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Weather: Mostly cloudy. Widespread fog in the morning. A slight chance of showers in the afternoon. Highs in the lower 80s. Southwest winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 20 percent. Friday Night: Mostly cloudy. A slight chance of showers in the evening. Lows in the mid 60s. North winds around 5 mph. Chance of rain 20 percent.
Today at the Editor’s Glance:
The Celtic Angels Christmas at Flagler Auditorium: 7 p.m. November 25 at Flagler Auditorium, 5500 State Road 100, Palm Coast. Tickets are $44 to $54. Book tickets here. Celtic Angels Christmas is a joyous celebration from start to finish, encompassing vocal and instrumental Holiday and Irish favorites. Paired with show-stopping world-class champion Irish dancing and a fully live band, Celtic Angels Christmas is sure to awe and entertain. Starring the quintessential vocals of Louise Barry, Olivia Bradley, Michaela Groth, Katie Sweeney, and Chloe Haven. These dynamic divas enthrall and delight with their jaw-dropping performances and spine-tingling harmonies.
World Cup: No exciting upsets on Thursday, but Brazil scored the goal of the tournament. Watch this:
Today it’s Wales and Iran at 5 a.m., Qatar and Senegal at 8 (Qatar’s only chance to pull off a win), Netherlands and Ecuador at 11 and, the marquee game of the day, the United States and England at 2 p.m
Have Shopping Holidays Jumped the Shark? We can only hope. From Statista: “After years of unabated growth, Black Friday and Cyber Monday online sales dipped for the first time last year, as many shops spread out deals over the entire Thanksgiving week or even further. “With early deals in October, consumers were not waiting around for discounts on big shopping days like Cyber Monday and Black Friday,” said Taylor Schreiner, Director at Adobe Digital Insights. According to Adobe’s estimates, U.S. consumers spent $10.7 billion on Cyber Monday last year, slightly down from $10.8 billion in 2020. Black Friday spending also just missed the 2020 record, coming in at $8.9 billion in 2021 vs. $9.0 billion the year before. The fact that the dedicated shopping holidays didn’t beat spending records last year doesn’t mean that shoppers were cutting back on their holiday spending generally. They merely spread it out throughout the holiday season. Between November 1 and November 29, U.S. consumers spent $109.8 billion online, up 11.9 percent from the same period in 2020. Moreover, 22 days exceeded $3 billion in online sales in November 2021, up from just 9 days in November 2020 and further proof of shoppers spending their holiday cash more evenly than before.”
Notably: The Times, alongside a piece headlined “Three recent mass shootings have left 14 chairs empty this Thanksgiving,” reran a piece from its archives on Thanksgiving day about “Why Does the U.S. Have So Many Mass Shootings.” The article goes on to say it’s not because the country is unusually violent, or because of its frayed racial divisions, or even mental health problems. All those theories “have been debunked by research on shootings elsewhere in the world.” Rather, “The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.” But why are there an astronomical number of guns, if not because of a certain unknowing coziness with violence? The answer: “the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries, according to a landmark 1999 study by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins of the University of California, Berkeley. Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.”
Now this:From the Luka Collection:
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.
August 2026
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Primary Election Early Voting in Flagler County
Second Saturday Plant Sale at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Meeting
Randy Fine Press Conference/Campaign Stop at Beverly Beach Town Hall
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Primary Election Early Voting in Flagler County
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Al-Anon Family Groups
For the full calendar, go here.
The glossy paperback books, the tubes of toothpaste, and the boxes of candies have the same colors: one has the vague impression that reading these books will leave a sweet taste in your mouth, and that the candy will have stories to tell. I buy soap, creams, and toothbrushes. Here the creams are creamy, the soaps are soapy: this honesty is a forgotten luxury. As soon as you stray from this norm, the quality of the products becomes more dubious. Certainly, the stores on Fifth Avenue will satisfy the most exacting tastes, but those furs, those suits of such international elegance are reserved for the international capitalist. As for the more popular shops, at first their abundance and sparkling variety are astonishing. But if the men’s shirts are attractive, the ties are doubtful, the women’s handbags and shoes are quite ugly, and in this profusion of dresses, blouses, skirts, and coats, a Frenchwoman would have trouble finding anything that didn’t offend her taste. And then one soon perceives that beneath their multicolored paper wrappers, all the chocolates have the same peanut taste, and all the best-sellers tell the same story. So why choose one toothpaste over another? In this useless profusion, there’s an aftertaste of deception. There are a thousand possibilities, but they’re all the same. A thousand choices, but all equivalent. In this way, the American citizen can squander his obligatory domestic freedom without perceiving that this life itself is not free.
–From Simone de Beauvoir’s America Day By Day (1954), translated from French by Carol Cosman.
Joe D says
Wow! The article was REALLY written in 1954?
….could have been written yesterday, and no one would disagree with it! Kind of SAD, we haven’t made more progress….