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Weather: Showers and thunderstorms likely. Highs in the upper 80s. Chance of rain 70 percent. Friday Night: Mostly cloudy with showers and thunderstorms likely in the evening, then partly cloudy after midnight. Lows in the mid 70s. Chance of rain 70 percent.
Today at a Glance:
Free For All Fridays with Host David Ayres, an hour-long public affairs radio show featuring local newsmakers, personalities, public health updates and the occasional surprise guest, starts a little after 9 a.m. after FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam’s Reality Check. Among today’s guests: Palm Coast City Council member Theresa Pontieri. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM and 1550 AM.
The Scenic A1A Pride Committee meets at 9 a.m. at the Hammock Community Center, 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast. The meetings are open to the public.
The Blue 22 Forum, a discussion group organized by local Democrats, meets at 12:15 p.m. at the conference room behind the Beverly Beach Town Hall, 2735 North Oceanshore Boulevard, Beverly Beach. It normally meets at the Palm Coast Community Center, but will be meeting at Beverly Beach through Aug. 11. Come and add your voice to local, state and national political issues.
John Fogerty at the St. Augustine Amphitheatre, 1340 A1A South, St. Augustine. Call the box office Thursdays and Fridays 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturdays 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Otherwise see the amphitheater’s website, or click for tickets here. Tickets are $64 to $134. Fogerty’s early career began with the popular rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR), and he is now a solo recording artist. Fogerty was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1993, won a Grammy Award for his album Blue Moon Swamp in 1997, and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2005.
Bonkerz Comedy Night, 352 South Nova Road, Daytona Beach, 6:30 p.m. $15 for members, $17 for non-members. Brian Aldridge is a fraternity boy all grown up. A “reformed frat boy” if you will. Already with three television appearances, Comedy Central Up Next, FOX’s “Laughs” & “Trial By Laughter”, under his belt and no doubt more to come, Brian is a rising comedy star. Brian can also be heard on “The Bob & Tom Show”. His sarcastic delivery and sharp wit will have you rolling with laughter one minute and asking yourself, “Did he really just say that?” the next. A Chicago native, Brian got his start opening for great comedians like Dave Chappelle, Carlos Mencia, Chelsea Handler, Bill Burr, Damon Wayons, and others who will undoubtedly be offended now that they weren’t mentioned. A veteran of countless comedy festivals and headliner of great comedy rooms all over the country, Brian is set to soon be a household name. Don’t miss the chance to see this talented man!
In Coming Days:
September 16: Flagler OARS’ 3rd Annual Recovery Festival at Veterans Park in Flagler Beach, from 3 to 9 p.m., with live bands, food trucks, exhibitors, hosted by Open Arms Recovery Services. Vendor booth space and sponsorships available. Click here or contact [email protected].
Keep in Mind: The Belle Terre Swim & Racquet Club is open, welcoming and taking new memberships, and if you enroll before Sept. 1, you’ll beat the price increase kicking in then. Experience the many amenities including a lap pool, wading pool, tennis/pickleball courts, sauna, and a modern wellness center–all for less than what you’d pay just for a fitness center at your typical commercial gym. Friendly staff is available to answer any questions you may have about becoming a member. Belle Terre Swim and Racquet Club is the sort of place where you can connect with fellow community members and experience the welcoming atmosphere that sets BTSRC apart. If you have any questions, feel free to call at 386-446-6717. If you would like to learn more about our club and membership options please visit online.
Notably: It’s not Korea, it’s World War I–which began on this day in 2014–that seems to be the forgotten war to end all forgotten wars. What is it about memory, like Saul Steinberg’s famous perspectival “View of the World from 9th Avenue,” that makes us give recent memory such hierarchical supremacy no matter how catastrophic less recent traumas may be? It’s the natural order of things. Ninth Avenue is who and what we are. The 50 million soldiers dead or maimed of World War I–that “phenomenon of such extended malignance as the Great War,” Barbara Tuchman wrote–and the the flu of 1918 that killed another 50 million are nothing now: who marks their memory, compared to the still-prevailing orgies of mourning over 9/11? Starvation and typhus killed 6 million civilians in 1919: we don’t even know there was a typhus and famine epidemic in 1919. “The Great War of 1914-18 lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours,” Tuchman wrote. Does it? Her observation evokes a line from another World War I classic, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern memory, where he referred to “the irony of benign ignorance.” Ours, that is. But if we were to remember, what then? Why stop at World War I? What of our own Civil War, now the stuff of PBS memorabilia? What of the wars of religion, the Crusades, Tamerlane’s and Gengis Khan’s extended malignance? It’s not simply easier to stick with recent mayhem. It’s a matter of mental survival. We remember at our own risk, as “our sympathy,” Gibbon reminds us, “is cold to the relation of distant misery.” Or must be.
—P.T.
Now this: The Economist: See what three degrees of global warming looks like
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.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
For the full calendar, go here.
What is the twentieth century’s signature sound? You could have a debate about it. Some might say the slow drone of an aero engine. Maybe from a lone fighter crawling across an azure 1940s sky. Or the scream of a fast jet passing low overhead, shaking the ground. Or the whup whup whup of a helicopter. Or the roar of a laden 747 lifting off. Or the crump of bombs falling on a city. All of those would qualify. They’re all uniquely twentieth-century noises. They were never heard before. Never, in all of history. Some crazy optimists might lobby for a Beatles song. A yeah, yeah, yeah chorus fading under the screams of their audience. I would have sympathy for that choice. But a song and screaming could never qualify. Music and desire have been around since the dawn of time. They weren’t invented after 1900. No, the twentieth century’s signature sound is the squeal and clatter of tank tracks on a paved street. That sound was heard in Warsaw, and Rotterdam, and Stalingrad, and Berlin. Then it was heard again in Budapest and Prague, and Seoul and Saigon. It’s a brutal sound. It’s the sound of fear. It speaks of a massive overwhelming advantage in power. And it speaks of remote, impersonal indifference. Tank treads squeal and clatter and the very noise they make tells you they can’t be stopped. It tells you you’re weak and powerless against the machine. Then one track stops and the other keeps on going and the tank wheels around and lurches straight toward you, roaring and squealing. That’s the real twentieth-century sound.
–From Lee Child’s The Enemy (2004).
Ray W. says
Thank you for your comment about memory and the all-too human need to forget distant memories as a means of mental self-preservation.
On occasion, whenever I comment on the foundation, the cement, the concrete base, the most basic reasons for the very existence of the modern conservative movement, which began with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, a commenter here and there might object to my referring to the event, as the commenter believes it is far too distant in time to have any meaning in today’s world, as if our federal and state congresses should forget that the conservative movement was founded on the separation of powers, the rule of law, the rights of individuals, the very protections of the people against the tyranny of the kings. Parlaiment gathered a militia and drove King James II from power when he attempted to limit its powers. Parlaiment then adopted a new Hanoverian king who agreed to respect Parlaiment’s powers, and then passed a Bill of Rights. Our founding fathers didn’t forget those most important of events, only our founding fathers did not adopt a new king after driving King George III from our shores; they adopted a liberal democratic Constitutional republic, admittedly as an experiment that they worried was likely to fail. In this experiment, no one political party or figure was to ever gain unlimited powers for an indeterminate period of time.
Today, to Republican leaders, the executive branch seems to be the gravitational center of all political powers. Legislatures all over this country bend to the will of their supreme leaders, yet the Republican Party continues to call itself a party of conservatism. The rule of law doesn’t just mean whatever a governor or former president says it is, and we should never forget it. Israel is struggling with that issue at this moment in time, with a supreme leader gathering additional powers by stripping them from the courts.
Let’s face facts. Democrats claim to be the party of progressives, and they are. Republicans claim to be the party of conservatives and they aren’t. Give me an announced progressive who believes in the rule of law, the separation of powers and individual rights any day over an announced conservative who doesn’t believe in any of those things. Add to it the expressed desire by a local Republican leader to behead Democrats and the choice is simple.
I concede, however, that I chuckled when I heard of the country & western ditty titled: The Dipstick Song, by Bill Whyte. The refrain is that all the oil is in Texas and the dipsticks are in DC. Or in Tallahassee.
Laurel says
Ray W.: Keep it up, please!
Yes, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis and Benjamin Netanyahu are hard at work trying to become a Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un or a Xi Jinping. They have no care or concern for constitutions or rule of law. They have no concerns about us, other than how to control us. These are troubling times.
The good news is, these types usually fail. The bad news is, they do a lot of damage that needs cleaning up.
Alice says
No wonder his ratings are so low, and major donors are bailing out. He has done enough to destroy Florida don’t vote for him to be President because what he has done to Florida he will do to this whole country.
Skibum says
Just as Hitler became so extreme that some of his own generals tried, and almost succeeded in killing him, oberfuher desatan has also seemed to have finally crossed some unwritten boundary of decency that even some fellow GOP cult members and donors are unable to tolerate and support. We can only hope that in his ongoing bid to out-extreme the twice impeached and multiple indicted former president in his uphill battle to garner more supporters in what is increasingly looking like a failed bid to become president, that more people in the GOP are willing to actually open their eyes and ears, as well as their minds and see this despicable excuse of a governor for what he has crafted himself to become – a joke.