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Weather: Mostly cloudy. A slight chance of showers in the morning. Highs in the upper 60s. Northeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 20 percent. Friday Night: Mostly cloudy. Lows in the mid 50s. Northeast winds 5 to 10 mph. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
In Court: A competency and a bond hearing are scheduled in the case of Vergilio Aguilar Mendez in Courtroom 328 before Circuit Judge R. Lee Smith at the St. Johns County courthouse, 4010 Lewis Speedway, St. Augustine. Mendez faces a first degree felony charge of aggravated manslaughter in the death of St. Johns County Sheriff’s deputy Mike Kunovich last May. Kunovich collapsed and died in an apparent heart attack shortly after arresting mendez on a resisting charge at a Super 8 in St. Augustine. See: “A Poisoned Tree Grows in St. Augustine.”
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. It’s a special call-in Christmas show. 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 24 Forum, a discussion group organized by local Democrats, meets at 12:15 p.m. at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE. Come and add your voice to local, state and national political issues.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center: Nightly from 6 to 9 p.m. at Palm Coast’s Central Park, with 55 lighted displays you can enjoy with a leisurely stroll around the pond in the park. Admission to Fantasy Lights is free, but donations to support Rotary’s service work are gladly accepted. Holiday music will pipe through the speaker system throughout the park, Santa’s Village, which has several elf houses for the kids to explore, will be open, with Santa’s Merry Train Ride nightly (weather permitting), and Santa will be there every Sunday night until Christmas, plus snow on weekends! On certain nights, live musical performances will be held on the stage.
In Coming Days:
Dec. 23: Culmination of toy drive for Toys for Tots at AW Custom Kitchens, European Village, starting at 11 a.m. A drawing for all eligible participants will take place at 2 p.m. Anyone who will have donated toys for the drive will have a chance to win various items, including a 65-inch 4K Smart TV, an Apple iPad, a pair of Apple Air Pods, and gift cards from the co-sponsors of the event. Fifty such cards have been donated. With proof of a voucher, donors also will receive a free hot dog, a free drink, a free popcorn, a free cotton candy, and a free snow cone. There will be a variety of fun things to do such as a bouncy house for children in thanks to the community for its generosity. See details here.
Notably: On April 12, 1945, a little over two weeks before Hitler killed himself in the abyss of his bunker’s who-gives-a-fuck loneliness, the New York Times ran its usual dozen editorials back when the editorial page alone contained almost as many words as an entire issue today. There was one about air power (“while airpower alone cannot win a war, the loss of airpower entails inevitable defeat…”), one headlined “Hitler to Himmler?” (The terror has at last turned inward upon the terrorists. The reports that tell of a split in the Nazi leadership say also that Himmler has superseded Hitler as head of the gang.”) There was a piece on the enduring price controls, one on Allies casualties (1.126 million killed, missing or wounded for the British empire, 892,909 for the United States, of whom 292,498 listed as dead or missing; the final tally will be closer to double that). There’s a lengthy one on America’s return to the Sulu Archipelago east of the Philipines (not to be confused with Saul bellow’s maligned Zulus). There is a silly piece asserting that Queen Nefertiti was “Not like Himmler” (the editors clearly had Himmler on the brain that day). There are several other pieces. But the one that caught my attention (as I read the paper from cover to cover of course), was this: an editorial entitled “Books for the Lonely.” In full: “‘The object of a book,’ John Cotton Dana once said, ‘is to be read, not ticketed and put on a shelf.’ Wisdom kept in idleness, he added, is wisdom no longer, but mere paper and ink. Books are lifesavers and mind-savers for men and women everywhere in the world in these lonely wartime days. They are all that poets and philosophers have said of them. They are ‘a shield against the ills of life, however things might go amiss.’ They are ‘the surest relief in the most melancholy moments.’ They are ‘the same firm friends, the same refreshment rich,’ these ‘silent, soothing companions in solitude.’ If any doubt remains, ask our thousands of men [and women? what about your 350,000 women who served?] now serving the nation on land and sea. Ask them what books mean to them in their weary vigils. Then heed the appeal this month of the American Merchant Marine Library Association for 600,000 donated volumes for the seamen of our cargo fleets and the men who guard our coasts.” Meanwhile in Orange County, Florida, the Orange County school system has removed 673 titles from school library shelves, including too many classics to enumerate here. It’s the shelves that are growing lonely, another sure sign of a civilization in decline.
—P.T.
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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.
January 2026
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Palm Coast Democratic Club Recap Meeting
Town of Marineland Commission Meeting
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Flagler County Cultural Council (FC3) Meeting
Friday Blue Forum
‘Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,’ the Billie Holiday Story, at City Rep Theatre
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Democratic Women’s Club
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
The Rainbow Bridge Dedication at Holland Park
For the full calendar, go here.
Slab City is not so sinister as it is a strange, forlorn quarter of America. It is a town that is not really a town, a former training grounds with nothing left but the concrete slabs where the barracks stood. Gen. George S. Patton trained troops here. Pilots of the Enola Gay practiced their atomic mission, dropping dummy bombs into the sea. The land belongs to the state, but the state, like the law, does not bother, and so the Slabs have become a place to park free. More than 3,000 elderly people settle in for the winter, in a pattern that dates back at least 20 years. They are mostly single, divorced or widowed – a whole generation on the road, independent, alone. In this place, to be 55 years old is to be young.
–From “Parked in Desert, Waiting Out the Winter of Life,” in The New York Times, Dec. 17, 2004.
Pogo says
@Silent night
Ray W. says
The Times just published a wide range of stories and vignettes about the possible rebirth of local news via online news outlets.
Thank you, Mr. Tristam, for laboriously maintaining an oasis in the middle of a nationwide news desert.
Pierre Tristam says
Thank you Ray, and thank you for resiliently enriching our version of a town square even against strong currents that seek to demean and impoverish.
Brynn Newton says
Hear! Hear!