Weather: Partly cloudy. A chance of showers with a slight chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. Humid with highs in the lower 90s. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40 percent. Heat index values up to 106. Tuesday Night: Mostly clear. A slight chance of showers and thunderstorms in the evening. Lows in the mid 70s. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 20 percent.
Today at the Editor’s Glance:
In Court: It’s pre-trial day in felony court.
The Palm Coast City Council meets in workshop at 9 a.m. at City Hall. The council will examine several financial and land-use items, including the establishment of the Landings Community Development District. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For meeting agendas, audio and video, go here.
The Community Traffic Safety Team led by Flagler County Commissioner Andy Dance meets at 9 a.m. in the first-floor conference room at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. You may also join by zoom. Meeting ID: 823 5444 1058, Passcode: 565882
The St. Johns River Water Management District Governing Board holds its regular monthly meeting at 10 a.m. at its Palatka headquarters. The public is invited to attend and to offer in-person comment on Board agenda items. A livestream will also be available for members of the public to observe the meeting online. Governing Board Room, 4049 Reid St., Palatka. Click this link to access the streaming broadcast. The live video feed begins approximately five minutes before the scheduled meeting time. Meeting agendas are available online here.
The Flagler County Planning Bard meeting scheduled for this evening was cancelled.
Keep in Mind: The Flagler Youth Orchestra Strings Program, a special project of the Flagler County School District, is launching its eighteenth season. Visit the string program’s website at www.flagleryouthorchestra.org to enroll online. Enrollment is open now and until Sept. 14. An open house and information session will be held August 31 from 5:30 to 7 p.m. at the Flagler Auditorium, 5500 State Road 100, in Palm Coast. Flagler County’s public, private, charter and home-schooled students, 8 years old and older, may sign up to play violin, viola, cello, or double bass. Beginner, intermediate and advanced musicians are welcome. Tuition is free. Limited instrument scholarships are available. Students will learn about the enriching world of classical music and many other genres while receiving comprehensive string instruction in a player-friendly environment twice a week after school. One-hour classes are held at Indian Trails Middle School on Mondays and Wednesdays between 3:30 and 6:30 p.m., depending on your child’s time slot. Some scheduling restrictions apply. Attend the August 31st orientation at the Flagler Auditorium to learn more about the strings program and how to get started. For more information about the program, call (386)503-3808 or email [email protected].
Notably: Today is the 77th anniversary of the dropping of an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, so often having a step-child victim status in comparison with poster-child Hiroshima. The Enola Gay is a household name. The name of the plane that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki (Bockscar) is not. The name of the bomb (Little Boy) that dropped on Hiroshima is known, the Nagasaki bomb less so (Fat Man), though naming these genocidal tools with anything other than numbers seems an added bit of hubris. 70,000+70,000 might have been appropriate for the Nagasaki bomb, which killed 70,000 people immediately and slow-killed 70,000 more, like medieval tortures, subsequently. Japan will observe a moment of silence. You can bet your 1945 savings bond that not a single local government, certainly not in Flagler, very possibly nowhere east of San Francisco, will observe such a moment, at least not one designated differently from pseudo-prayer moments that have weeded their way into local governments’ agenda preludes.
Now this:
Flagler Beach Webcam:
The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
[MEC id=”163848″]
For the full calendar, go here.
“I still see her sometimes in my dreams,” said Mr. Hayama, who was 15 and badly burned in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki 50 years ago today. “In front of me was a mother carrying a baby in a cloth on her back, and she was gently rocking back and forth so it could sleep.
“After a while I looked more closely, and I saw that the baby no longer had a head.”
Mr. Hayama, one of dozens of modern kataribe who pass on the oral tradition of the atomic bombings, paused and his jaw tightened.
“She didn’t seem to grasp what had happened,” he said. “She herself was very badly burned and hurt, and so maybe she had lost her mind.”
Half a century after American atomic bombs obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ended World War II, the kataribe are part of a struggle, in Milan Kundera’s phrase, of memory against forgetting. Particularly here in Nagasaki, a beautiful hilly city on a bay, citizens seem to slip back and forth between a desire to move on and bury the horrors of the past and a powerful yearning to give dead friends meaning by keeping the past alive.
–From “Through Survivors’ Tales, Nagasaki Joins Japan’s Timeless Folklore,” by Nicholas Kristoff, The New York Times, Aug. 9, 1995.
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