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Weather: Mostly cloudy in the morning, then becoming partly sunny. Highs in the upper 80s. South winds 10 to 15 mph with gusts up to 25 mph. Saturday Night: Mostly cloudy with a chance of showers with a slight chance of thunderstorms. Lows in the lower 60s. Chance of rain 50 percent. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
Presidential Primary Early Voting is available today from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at four locations. Any registered and qualified voter who is eligible to vote in a county-wide election may vote in person at the early voting site. According to Florida law, every voter must present a Florida driver’s license, a Florida identification card or another form of acceptable picture and signature identification in order to vote. If you do not present the required identification or if your eligibility cannot be determined, you will only be permitted to vote a provisional ballot. Don’t forget your ID. A couple of secure drop boxes that Ron DeSantis and the GOP legislature haven’t yet banned (also known as Secure Ballot Intake Stations) are available at the entrance of the Elections Office and at any early voting site during voting hours. The locations are as follows:
- Flagler County Elections Supervisor’s Office, Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell.
- Flagler County Public Library, 2500 Palm Coast Pkwy NW, Palm Coast.
- Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE.
- Flagler Beach United Methodist Church, 1520 South Daytona Avenue, Flagler Beach.
The Saturday Flagler Beach Farmers Market is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at Wickline Park, 315 South 7th Street, featuring prepared food, fruit, vegetables , handmade products and local arts from more than 30 local merchants. The market is hosted by Flagler Strong, a non-profit.
The Annual Strawberry festival in Palm Coast’s Central Park is on Saturday and Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. both days. Entry fee is $7 per person except for children 2 and under. The festival describes itself this way: “Family Fun & Festivities, Plant City Strawberries, Art & Crafts, Delicious Food, Free Bounce Houses, Organic Strawberries, Strawberry Shortcake, Live Entertainment, Free Rock Painting, Strawberry Fudge, Pony Rides, Free Strawberry Relay, Face Painting, Free Hula Hoop Contest, Pie Eating Contest, Free Petting Farm, Berry Cute Baby Contest, Free Sack Races, Train Rides, Free Corn Hole, Yummy Treats & Much More!”
Early Learning Coalition’s Free Storybook Village: Join The Early Learning Coalition of Flagler and Volusia for free family fun at the Flagler County Storybook Village at the Palm Coast Community Center, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. This event benefits the Flagler Imagination Library and celebrates children’s book author Laura Numeroff. As families travel through the “village,” they’ll collect Numeroff’s classic books and enjoy play-based literacy skill-building opportunities. Registration is optional but encouraged to help ELCFV ensure enough materials. For questions about this event, please contact Nancy Walsh: nwalsh@elcfv.org
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Monthly Meeting, 11 a.m. at Cypress Knoll Golf Club, 53 Easthampton Blvd, Palm Coast. A monthly speaker is featured. Lunch is available for $20 in cash, $21 by credit card, but must be ordered in advance. The lunch menu is available on our website. Lunch may be ordered by sending an email to: AAUWFlagler1984@gmail.com. The association holds a 2024 National Election Roundtable Discussion. This spring AAUW members will be asked to vote on an amendment to the national bylaws recommended by the AAUW Board of Directors and AAUW Governance Committee that would open membership to any individual who supports AAUW’s important mission of advancing equity for women and girls. Attend the meeting to get your questions answered, share your opinion and come away with information to make an informed decision about how you will vote.
Rick de Yampert, Palm Coast Author of ‘Crows and Ravens,’ Holds Book-Signing at Vedic Moons: Palm Coast author and FlaglerLive’s arts and culture writer, Rick de Yampert is holding a book signing and meet-and-greet from 2 to 4 p.m. at Vedic Moons–Ayurvedic Wellness, Metaphysical Shop & Herbal Apothecary, 4984 Palm Coast Parkway, Units 4-6, in Palm Coast (across from St. Joe’s Plaza). Llewellyn, one of the world’s major metaphysical publishers, publishes de Yampert’s Crows and Ravens: Mystery, Myth, and Magic of Sacred Corvids, on March 8. The event also will feature de Yampert’s Mr. Crow art for sale. For more information, see the Vedic Moons website at vedicmoons.com, or call the shop at 386-585-5167. See de Yampert’s Llewellyn author page here, and his Amazon page here. Visit de Yampert’s personal websites at rickdeyampert.com and mistercrowart.com. See: “Rick de Yampert, FlaglerLive’s Arts and Culture Writer, Releases ‘Crows and Ravens’ Book.”
Gamble Jam: Musicians of all ages can bring instruments and chairs and join in the jam session, 2 to 5 p.m. . Program is free with park admission! Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area at Flagler Beach, 3100 S. Oceanshore Blvd., Flagler Beach, FL. Call the Ranger Station at (386) 517-2086 for more information. The Gamble Jam is a family-friendly event that occurs every second and fourth Saturday of the month. The park hosts this acoustic jam session at one of the pavilions along the river to honor the memory of James Gamble Rogers IV, the Florida folk musician who lost his life in 1991 while trying to rescue a swimmer in the rough surf.
The St. Augustine Celtic Music and Heritage Festival, Francis Field, 25 W Castillo Dr, St. Augustine, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday, 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sunday. St. Augustine is America’s Oldest Celtic City which hosts the multi-award winning St. Augustine Celtic Music & Heritage Festival. Experience top international & U.S. Celtic bands, highland games, parade, whiskey tasting, workshops, lectures, Celtic food, and much more! Saturday morning the festival hosts the Original St Patrick Parade established in 1601. General admission is $20 per day. VIP all-weekend ticket, not including Friday’s whiskey tasting, is $100 per person. Book here.
Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony at the Jacksonville Symphony, 7:30 p.m. at Jacoby Symphony Hall, Times-Union Center for the Performing Arts, 300 Water Street, Suite 200, Jacksonville. Saint-Saëns created one of the most unique symphonies ever written by bringing the awe-inspiring power of the concert organ to his Third Symphony. Hear the passionate melodies of the Bryan Concert Organ alongside the full forces of the Symphony in a program that also features Ravel’s use of nostalgia and irony in La valse, and composer Courtney Bryan’s return to Jacksonville for the world premiere of a new work commissioned by Music Director Courtney Lewis and the Jacksonville Symphony. $30-$84. Book here.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The food pantry is organized by Pastor Charles Silano and Grace Community Food Pantry, a Disaster Relief Agency in Flagler County. Feeding Northeast Florida helps local children and families, seniors and active and retired military members who struggle to put food on the table. Working with local grocery stores, manufacturers, and farms we rescue high-quality food that would normally be wasted and transform it into meals for those in need. The Flagler County School District provides space for much of the food pantry storage and operations. Call 386-586-2653 to help, volunteer or donate.
Notably: Byzantium’s gotten a bum rap. Gibbon was wrong when he judged it to have “subsisted one thousand and fifty-eight years in a state of premature and perpetual decay.” It was not Athens or Rome or Paris or New York or Brindisi or Beirut or Palm Coast, but it was Constantinople, and in some regards it outdid the combined achievements of the P and F Sections combined. It was in its day–around the millennium and for 200 years after that, until the Catholics of the Fourth Crusade–those barbarians–sacked it in 1204 and massacred its Christians, not least in retaliation for its own massacre of Latins, as it called Catholics, in 1182, either cutting throats, forcing uncut throats to flee, or enslaving remaining throats and selling them to Seljuk Turks. But on the whole, it was a nice place, the richest, most august of the planet for those years, decrepit and–well, Byzantine though it was beneath a surface Mehmed II finally sheared off when his Muslims took over the city in 1453. (Actually the city was a shell of itself after the sack of 1204, from which it never recovered). It would be a while before Constantinople became Istanbul. Unlike Catholics or Byzantium’s own Greek Orthodox barbarians, the Muslim one did not put the inhabitants to the sword, preferring to safeguard them as workers and merchants who would turn the city to his profit. It must have profited him handsomely: a portrait shows him as corpulent as our own Howard Taft, though Mehmed wasn’t as conservative as our Taftness and his Supreme Court at the time, the court our current Supremes are enthusiastically and successfully trying to out do: if you want dark ages, bet on Catholics. They have yet to disappoint, from Augustine to Aquinas to Roberts. All this by way of introduction to the lovely video below, by the charming Şerif Yenen, whose charms I never knew until I happened by this video by chance, when I googled “Chora art” after reading about it in one of my pathological bouts of reading (on the crusades). I like Şerif Yenen a lot more than I do Joseph Brodsky, whom I used to love and worship in my early 20s, until, rereading some of his essays, his cultural racism and revolting superiority jumped up. He will always be a great poet, but he could use a bit of Byzantine flavor.
—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.
May 2025
Palm Coast City Council Workshop
Community Traffic Safety Team Meeting
St. Johns River Water Management District Meeting
Flagler County School Board Workshop: Agenda Items
Flagler Beach Library Book Club
Flagler County Planning Board Meeting
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
River to Sea Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) Bicycle/Pedestrian Advisory Committee Meeting
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library
For the full calendar, go here.
The delirium and horror of the East. The dusty catastrophe of Asia. Green only on the banner of the Prophet. Nothing grows here except mustaches. A blackeyed, overgrouwn-with-stubble-before-supper part of the world. Bonfire embers doused with urine. That smell! A mixture of foul tobacco and sweaty soap and the underthings wrapped around loins like another turban. Racism? But isn’t it only a form of misanthropy? And that ubiquitous grit flying in your muzzle even in the city, poking the world out of your eyes–and yet one feels grateful even for that. Ubiquitous concrete, with the texture of turd and the color of an upturned grave. Ah, all that nearsighted scum–Corbusier, Mondrian, Gropius–who mutilated the world more effectively than any Luftwaffe! Snobbery? But it’s only a form of despair. The local population in a state of total stupor whiling its time awav in squalid smack bars, tilting its heads as in a namaz in reverse toward the television screen, where somebody is permanently beating somebody else up. Or else they’re dealing out cards, whose jacks and nines are the sole accessible abstraction, the single means of concentration. Misanthropy? Despair? Yet what else could be expected from one who has outlived the apotheosis of the linear Principle? From a man who has nowhere to go back to? From a great turdologist, sacrophage, and the possible author of Sadomachia?
–From Joseph Brodsky’s “Flight from BYzantium,” in Less Than One (1987).
Pogo says
@FWIW
“Joseph Brodsky (born May 24, 1940, Leningrad, Russia, U.S.S.R. [now St. Petersburg, Russia]—died January 28, 1996, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.) was a Russian-born American poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 for his important lyric and elegiac poems…”
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Joseph-Brodsky
I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want.
— Mark Twain