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Weather: 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:
New Year’s Eve in Flagler Beach: The Flagler Beach Mayor and City Commissioners invite residents and visitors to celebrate the start of 2024. The night’s events will begin at 8:00 PM at Veterans Park (corner of Moody Boulevard/State Route 100 and Oceanshore Boulevard (State Route A1A), with music and entertainment provided by “The Sound of the Surf- 97.3 FM.” An oversized illuminated surfboard (fabricated by Tango) will be lowered to mark the stroke of midnight, followed immediately by a fireworks display (My Three Sons Fireworks Company) launched from the Flagler Beach Pier. Many Flagler Beach restaurants and businesses will be open late that evening to welcome visitors and the new year! Come celebrate New Year’s Eve 2023 in Flagler Beach!
The Cold-Weather Shelter known as the Sheltering Tree will open tonight: 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:
Readings: Jonathan Weisman, a political correspondent for the New York Times, on Dec. 10 attempted to answer this question, posed in the headline above his story: “Is Anti-Zionism Always Antisemitic?” It’s a clear exploration of the question, with a fairly good answer, though to me the answer is similar to Justice Stewart’s definition of porn or obscenity (both of which are indistinguishable from anti-Semitism, or from attempts to paint all anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism): “I know it when I see it.” There is a distasteful hurdle in the very first line of Weisman’s article, which reads: “The brutal shedding of Jewish blood on Oct. 7, followed by Israel’s relentless military assault on Gaza, has brought a fraught question to the fore in a moment of surging bigotry and domestic political gamesmanship.” Note the judgment of the word “brutal.” Nothing wrong with that, though the shedding of Jewish blood, as opposed to the more accurate, more journalistic and less sensational shedding of Israeli blood, especially in the context of this piece, sets it up as more tendentious than it ought to be, especially with the very next words: followed by Israel’s relentless military assault on Gaza. The piece was written on Dec. 10, two months into the war, with around 17,000 dead recorded by then. “Relentless,” in this context, is a cowardly word, absolving of the genocidal assault, especially when contrasted with the use of “brutal” in the previous clause, and even more especially when, blood for blood, life for life, the “relentless” Israeli assault was on its way to being 20 times more brutal than Hamas’s. This isn’t in any way to excuse or justify Hamas, obviously. There is no hierarchy in atrocity. But Weisman’s opening sentence establishes just such a hierarchy, blatantly and either with apparent indifference to the misuse of at least one of the words in the sentence or its malicious construction–the more so because of what follows: again, a fairly good exploration of a necessary subject, with accusations of anti-Semitism as exploitative as anti-Semitism’s actual offenses. I’ll leave it at that for now.
—P.T.
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