To include your event in the Briefing and Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Weather: Partly cloudy. Highs around 70. East winds 5 to 10 mph. Friday Night: Mostly cloudy. A slight chance of showers and thunderstorms after midnight. Not as cool. Near steady temperature around 60. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 20 percent. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
In Court: Circuit Judge Terence Perkins hears a motion at 12:30 p.m. by the state to keep Robert Goldstein at the county jail, disallowing him to post bond. See: “Face-Recognition Software Leads to Man Accused in Pair of Disturbing Incidents Involving a Woman and a Girl.”
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. Today: Danielle Anderson of Flagler News Weekly, Rich Carrol of WNZF, Brian McMillan of the Observer and FlaglerLive Editor review the year’s top stories. On WNZF at 94.9 FM and 1550 AM.
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.
First Friday in Flagler Beach, the monthly festival of music, food and leisure, is scheduled for this evening at Downtown’s Veterans Park, 105 South 2nd Street, from 5 to 9 p.m. The event is overseen by the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency and run by Laverne M. Shank Jr. and Surf 97.3
In Coming Days:
Saturday, Jan. 6: Volusia Latin Festival and Three Kings Festival: 1 a.m. to 8 p.m., Dewey O. Boster Sports Complex, 1200 Saxon Boulevard, Deltona. Come celebrate Latin culture at this free, family-friendly event that everyone can enjoy! You’ll be treated to loads of live music from talented artists, delicious Latin American food, traditional folkloric art, children’s activities, and much more. This annual festival is hosted by the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Central Florida. Free admission.
Sunday, Jan. 7: Florida Winter Volleyball Festival, Daytona Beach Ocean Center, 101 North Atlantic Avenue, starting at 9 a.m. The NIKE Florida Winter Volleyball Festival is the first tournament weekend of 2024! We will, once again, have the Florida Girls Club Cup and the Boy’s Pre-Qualifier played in Daytona Beach at the Ocean Center. This is a LEVEL I event and will receive full ranking points for FL Region Ranking Report. Room for 250 teams. Teams will be accepted on a first-come, first serve basis based upon receipt of entry fee and, if not a local team, confirmation of hotel booking. Entry fees can be refunded up to 30 days prior to the first date of tournament play. If the event is canceled for any reason entry fees will be refunded to all teams minus $20 if after November 1st and $30 if after December 1st to cover expenses already incurred such as awards, non-refundable facility deposits, shipping, etc. Click here to Register.
Notably: Speaking to the governor of an Afghan province in 1980, in the early days of the Soviet invasion of that country, the British reporter Robert Fisk (now the late Robert Fisk) was hearing about the local culture when the governor told him: “But we have two societies in our country, one in the cities and one in the villages. The city people accept equal rights but the villages are more traditional. Sometimes we have moved too quickly. It takes time to arrive at the goals of our revolution.” It is the perfect little foreign-correspondent quote. So perfect that it is a cliche. It has the ring of authenticity, and I’m not doubting that the governor told him those very words, and that they were accurate. But reported as they were in a dispatch datelined JALALEBAD in 1980, they created–they create still–that sense of insistent otherness that they are intended to create, what Edward Said in Orientalism encapsulated in a few wry words: the quote creates “a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’). This vision in a sense created and then served the two worlds thus conceived. Orientals lived in their world, ‘we’ lived in ours.” But this is how false., in that regard, Fisk’s decision to carry the reproduce the quote only with Orientalist assumptions as context: I recall, as you may as well, that in 2004 a book called The Great Divide: Retro v. Metro America was making the rounds of newspaper review desks and a few other places. It was almost 300 pages of graphic analyses (with CD) of exactly what the Jalalebad governor was talking about, but in America. It was nothing but the divide between mostly rural and mostly urban America, and the same divisions. Of course we could argue that there’s no comparison between the rural crags of Afghanistan where, around the same weeks Fisk was there in 1980, he came across a schoolteacher and his wife who were burned and hung as an example of what happens to people who run a school for both girls and boys, in the same classrooms. But when what would you make of Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, two ostensibly upstanding rural Wyomingians, who picked up Matthew Shephard at a bar on Oct. 6, 1998, then took him to an isolated somewhere, tortured him, cracked his skull, and left him to die, because he was gay? It’s not an exceptional example. From Human Rights Watch last October 16: “… the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released its annual crime report for 2022 showing that anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes were up sharply from the prior year, with a 13.8% increase in reports based on sexual orientation and a shocking 32.9% jump in reported hate crimes based on gender identity. … The FBI’s report noted that there were 1,947 recorded incidents relating to an alleged victim’s sexual orientation in 2022, up from 1,711 the year before, and 469 relating to an alleged victim’s gender identity, vs. 353 the year before. The gender identity category included 338 instances that were specifically anti-transgender and 131 that targeted someone who was gender noncomforming. […] The FBI’s report comes amid an unprecedented spike in anti-LGBTQ+ state legislation, with more than 550 bills introduced in 43 states, and more than 80 signed into law — more than doubling last year, which was previously the worst year on record. The wave of harmful and discriminatory legislation — some of which was engineered and championed by extremist GOP candidates running for president and their allies — and the concurrent spike in anti-transgender rhetoric and violence prompted HRC in June to declare a national state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people for the first time in the organization’s more than 40-year history.” There are differences with Afghanistan. But the differences are not those we assume, or, with our usual orientalism, take comfort in.
—P.T.
View this profile on Instagram
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.
Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could’ve been. It can be corrupting.
–From Richard Ford’s Independence Day (1995).
