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Weather: Mostly cloudy. A chance of showers in the morning. Highs in the lower 60s. Southwest winds around 5 mph. Chance of rain 40 percent. Thursday Night: Partly cloudy. Lows in the mid 40s. West winds 5 to 10 mph. Check tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
The Cold-Weather Shelter known as the Sheltering Tree will open FRIDAY NIGHT: The shelter opens at Church on the Rock at 2200 North State Street in Bunnell as the overnight temperature is expected to fall to 40 or below. It will open from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. The shelter is open to the homeless and to the nearly-homeless: anyone who is struggling to pay a utility bill or lacks heat or shelter and needs a safe, secure place for the night. The shelter will serve dinner and breakfast. Call 386-437-3258, extension 105 for more information. Flagler County Transportation offers free bus rides from pick up points in the county, starting at 3 p.m., at the following locations and times:
- Dollar General at Publix Town Center, 3:30 p.m.
- Near the McDonald’s at Old Kings Road South and State Road 100, 4 p.m.
- Dollar Tree by Carrabba’s and Walmart, 4:30 p.m.
- Palm Coast Main Branch Library, 4:45 p.m.
Also: - Dollar General at County Road 305 and Canal Avenue in Daytona North, 4 p.m.
- Bunnell Free Clinic, 4:30 p.m.
- First United Methodist Church in Bunnell, 4:30 p.m.
The shelter is run by volunteers of the Sheltering Tree, a non-profit under the umbrella of the Flagler County Family Assistance Center, is a non-denominational civic organization. The Sheltering Tree is in need of donations. See the most needed items here, and to contribute cash, donate here or go to the Donate button at this page.
The Bach Festival Continues: The annual Bach Festival on WKCR runs uninterrupted, commercial free, 24 hours a day, until Dec. 31 at 11:59 p.m. It is accessible online here. No app, no hassles. Just click on “Listen.” WKCR is the radio station of Columbia University. It has been producing the Bach festival since 1980, with students and guests hosting. And if 170 hours aren’t enough, the 89th Annual Bach Festival at Rollins College (it’s been going strong since 1935) begins February 2 and runs through March 3, under the artistic direction of John V. Sinclair. Concerts will include performances by the 160-voice Bach Festival Choir and Orchestra, and guest soloists. It’s presented by the Bach Festival Society of Winter Park. See every concert here, with some of them free and open to the public, but you must reserve ahead of time. See: “Putting Bach Back in Christmas.”
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:
Notably: Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act on this day 50 years ago. It is a milestone, and in some real ways a triumph: “We estimate the Endangered Species Act has prevented the extinction of roughly 291 species since passage in 1973, and has to date saved more than 99% of species under its protection,” one study whose numbers the White House is happy to cite (without credit) found. But there’s a catch: unlike nature, the Act is bound by American borders. In 2015, Elizabeth Kolbert won the Pulitzer for The Sixth Extinction, arguing that we are in the midst of that sixth: “Over the last half a billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us.” That’s from the book’s publisher. There’s been comparisons of humans to asteroids, going on the fifth extinction, when an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs. “We are effectively undoing the beauty and the variety and the richness of the world which has taken tens of millions of years to reach,” Kolbert said on the ironically titled Fresh Air on NPR around the time of publication. ” … We’re sort of unraveling that. … We’re doing, it’s often said, a massive experiment on the planet, and we really don’t know what the end point is going to be.”
—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.
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.
“Obviously, the fate of our own species concerns us disproportionately. But at the risk of sounding anti-human—some of my best friends are humans!—I will say that it is not, in the end, what’s most worth attending to. Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy. The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have—or have not—inherited the earth.”
–From Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History(2014).
Pogo says
@P.T.
About today’s Notably/Quote — quite sobering, or ought to be.
“We have met the enemy and he is us.”
— Walt Kelly
wow says
Most of the people I know are not indigenous Americans. Therefore it struck me that the immigrants at the border want nothing more than what OUR ancestors wanted when they came here. How sad that we’ve not realized that.