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Weather: Mostly sunny. Highs in the lower 80s. Southwest winds 10 to 15 mph.
Tonight: Partly cloudy in the evening, then becoming mostly cloudy. Patchy fog after midnight. Lows in the upper 50s. West winds 5 to 10 mph. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
Ralph Carter Park Community Update: The City of Palm Coast hosts a Ralph Carter Park Community Update meeting for residents of the R-Section and users of Ralph Carter Park, at 6 p.m. in the community wing of City Hall at 160 Lake Avenue. The update will include a neighborhood safety update, coming park improvements and timelines, information about field capacity and usage, and a youth participation overview. The meeting is open to all, and will include and questions and answer period.
Separation Chat, Open Discussion: The Atlantic Chapter of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State hosts an open, freewheeling discussion on the topic here in our community, around Florida and throughout the United States, noon to 1 p.m. at its new location, Pine Lakes Golf Club Clubhouse Pub & Grillroom (no purchase is necessary), 400 Pine Lakes Pkwy, Palm Coast (0.7 miles from Belle Terre Parkway). Call (386) 445-0852 for best directions. All are welcome! Everyone’s voice is important. For further information email [email protected] or call Merrill at 804-914-4460.
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library: Do you enjoy Chess, trying out new moves, or even like some friendly competition? Come visit the Flagler County Public Library at the Teen Spot every Wednesday from 4 to 5 p.m. for Chess Club. Everyone is welcome, for beginners who want to learn how to play all the way to advanced players. For more information contact the Youth Service department 386-446-6763 ext. 3714 or email us at [email protected]
Notably: There was a time in my teens when I couldn’t go to sleep without a few doses of M*A*S*H. When my parents caught on and found it excessive, I just taped (as in audio: video was still in its infancy) the episodes and listened to them in bed. Of course we all watched the final episode, on this day in 1983, when we took a break from all that outrage over Reagan’s love affair with El Salvador’s terrorists and their mirror image in Nicaragua, thinking people my age would not finish the decade before ending up in the maw of one of his wars. There were “M*A*S*H bashes” everywhere, and everywhere, the Times reported (in a story that made the front page of the Metropolitan section, but not 1A: that would never happen today. It’d be all over the front page, displacing anything more serious), “the mood was a peculiar mixture of sadness, celebration, homage, sentimentality and hilarity.” As I recall, and Super Bowls aside, it was the single-most watched television show in American history, and remains so to this day, bested only by 10 Super Bowls, and only because the population has grown significantly since then. It drew 106 million viewers, besting the Carter-Reagan debate of 1980 by almost 30 million viewers. Over the years M*A*S*H lost its lustre for me. Its early years were always funny, but the sappiness, the preachiness, the sanctimony even, gradually took over the show, to the point of making Alan Alda difficult to bear. It’s either that or war is not so easy to satirise when it’s a daily norm. M*A*S*H had been a reaction to Vietnam, but even Vietnam now seems so 20th century. One of the key scenes in “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” the scene that explains why Hawkeye finally cracked up and ended up in the loony bin for a while, shows Hawkeye getting angry at a Korean woman as the whole M*A*S*H gang is returning from some kind of picnic. The bus has stopped, turned off all lights, gone all quiet to avoid detection by North Koreans or Chinese, but the Korean woman is holding a chicken that won’t stop clucking. Hawkeye loses it. The chicken finally stops. Of course it wasn’t a chicken. It was the woman’s infant. She’d strangled it. So he loses it, and we get some fine scenes with his psychiatrist, the great Alan Arbus, known as Sydney Friedman in the show. It’s not just fiction: E.B. Sledge, in With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, tells a similar story. A soldier had cracked up. A corpsman killed him to keep him quiet.
—P.T.
Now this: With the era’s commercials.
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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
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
For the full calendar, go here.
And I was married. I caught a train for Birmingham, for the other reunion. Because Liz was waiting in Birmingham, I chose to be discharged from active duty at Pensacola, and we rode down from Birmingham together, on the same slow, dusty train, stopping, as you always did, at Flomaton, and on down to the Gulf. But it wasn’t simply convenience that had brought me back to Pensacola. I wanted to return just once, just for a few days, to that place where I had learned the only skill I had, and where I had been happy in that timeless world of young men, before the dying began. Perhaps the impulse to return is a sign that one has grown up, an acknowledgment of the way the good times pass us. We go back in space because we can’t go back in time.
–From E.B. Sledge, With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa (1981).
