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Weather: Showers. Highs in the lower 70s. Southeast winds 15 to 20 mph with gusts up to 30 mph. Chance of rain 90 percent.
Friday Night: Mostly cloudy. A chance of showers with a slight chance of thunderstorms in the evening, then showers likely with a chance of thunderstorms after midnight. Lows in the lower 60s. South winds 10 to 15 mph with gusts up to 25 mph. Chance of rain 60 percent. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
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. after FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam’s Reality Check. Today David Alfin explains why he fired City Manager Denise Bevan. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM and 1550 AM.
The Scenic A1A Pride Committee meets at 9 a.m. at the Hammock Community Center, 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast. The meetings are open to the public.
The Flagler County Canvassing Board meets today at the Flagler County Supervisor of Elections office, Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. The meeting is open to the public. Check the time in the sidebar or in this chart, which includes the full year’s meeting schedule (the pdf schedule does not include the dates and times of required Canvassing Board meetings which may be necessary due to a recount called locally or statewide.) The board is chaired by County Judge Andrea Totten. This Election Year’s board members are Supervisor of Elections Kaiti Lenhart and County Commissioner Dave Sullivan. The alternates are County Judge Melissa Distler and County Commissioner Donald O’Brien. March-April meetings are for the presidential preference primary, such as it is. See all legal notices from the Supervisor of Elections, including updated lists of those ineligible to vote, here.
Flagler and Florida Unemployment Numbers Released: The state’s Commerce Department released the previous month’s preliminary unemployment numbers for Florida and its 67 counties, at 10 a.m. See the data releases page here.
This event has been postponed to April 1. Bunnell City Hall and Police Department Groundbreaking, Commerce Parkway Groundbreaking: The Bunnell City Commission and City staff, together with The Collage Companies, invite you to witness the historic groundbreaking event for the City’s new Administration and Police Department Complex. This new facility is one of the many legacy projects happening in the City which will leave a longstanding mark on Bunnell’s history for future generations. 10:30 a.m. at 2400 Commerce Parkway, Bunnell. Park at 2301 Commerce Parkway. Following this ceremony will be the groundbreaking ceremony for Flagler Central Commerce Parkway- a joint City of Bunnell and Flagler County project. This is yet another legacy project in the City of Bunnell which will impact the City and County for future generations. The Commerce Parkway groundbreaking is scheduled to start at 11:30 a.m.
Lunch and Learn and Town Hall Meeting with Palm Coast City Council Member Ed Danko, 1 p.m. at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE. It’s a free and public event for which you may sign up here. Through the Strategic Action Plan process–that is, the city council’s goals–each council member has prioritized engaging with Palm Coast residents to foster a stronger community connection and ensure that all voices are heard in shaping the future of the city.
Caryl Churchill’s ‘Vinegar Tom,’ at City Repertory Theatre, 160 Cypress Point Parkway (City Marketplace, Suite B207), Palm Coast, 7:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, 3 p.m. on Sunday. $15-$30. Book tickets here. From Director John Sbordone’s program notes: Caryl Churchill’s VINEGAR TOM, written in collaboration with the Monstrous Regiment Theatre Company, uses the hunt for witches in the 17th century, as stool to investigate the subjugation of women in a male dominated society. The lessons of the past, though more blatant than the present, are reflected in many aspects of our own society. Churchill, a leading feminist writer in Britain for over 50 years, explores the free spirited Alice, the subservient Susan, the caged in Betty, the destitute Joan and the ever helpful Ellen in the context of their repressive environment. She uses modern techniques such as the episodic scene to convey the pervasiveness of the subjugation without absorbing the audience in emotional crisis. She asks us to observe the behaviors without getting lost in their melodrama. One technique establishes these goals graphically. The songs are intended to covey a contemporary commentary on the behavior of the past. CRT is proud to present this daring exploration and thankful to Benjamin Beck for composing the compelling music to accompany our efforts.
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.
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock, 2 to 5 p.m., Picnic Shelter behind the Hammock Community Center at 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast. It’s a free event. Bring your Acoustic stringed Instrument (no amplifiers), and a folding chair and join other local amateur musicians for a jam session. Audiences and singers are also welcome. A “Jam Circle” format is where musicians sit around the circle. Each musician in turn gets to call out a song and musical key, and then lead the rest in singing/playing. Then it’s on to the next person in the circle. Depending upon the song, the musicians may take turns playing/improvising a verse and a chorus. It’s lots of Fun! Folks who just want to watch or sing generally sit on the periphery or next to their musician partner. This is a monthly event on the 4th Friday of every month
 Keep Their Lights On Over the Holidays: Flagler Cares, the social service non-profit celebrating its 10th anniversary, is marking the occasion with a fund-raiser to "Keep the Holiday Lights On" by encouraging people to sponsor one or more struggling household's electric bill for a month over the Christmas season. Each sponsorship amounts to $100 donation, with every cent going toward payment of a local power bill. See the donation page here. Every time another household is sponsored, a light goes on on top of a house at Flagler Cares' fundraising page. The goal of the fun-raiser, which Flagler Cares would happily exceed, is to support at least 100 families (10 households for each of the 10 years that Flagler Cares has been in existence). Flagler Cares will start taking applications for the utility fund later this month. Because of its existing programs, the organization already has procedures in place to vet people for this type of assistance, ensuring that only the needy qualify. |
Notebook: Like Harper Lee in 2016, Gabriel Garcia-Marquez died of dementia in 2014. Unlike Harper Lee, Garcia-Marquez was not a one-hit wonder. He was simply a wonder. The kind of wonder that still makes you swoon, and that has him on Colombia’s national currency. When’s the last time the United States honored one of its writers this way? It’s not as if we lack the talent in our pantheon. But that’s not the point today. The point is that as with Harper Lee, Garcia-Marquez’s family decided to issue the last novel he was working on, in finished form, as a novel. Until August. He did not want it published. He wanted it destroyed. His sons say that he was too far into dementia to judge. They did not issue it as a manuscript, but as an actual novel, as part of his oeuvre, which now risks tarnishing him. I haven’t read it, but I recall how the same controversy swirled over Go Set a Watchman, the pretty dismal supposed sequel, or prequel (I don’t remember, nor care to) Harper Lee wrote to To Kill a Mockingbird, and never intended to publish. For good reason. It’s a bad book, stylistically, thematically, literarily, and–not that it matters, but it does–it damages our need to know Atticus Finch as the Atticus Finch of Kill, not the racist, white supremacist Atticus of Go Set Your Head Straight. I read Garcia-Marquez’s last, a Retif de la Bretonne-like Memories of My Melancholy Whores, whose title alone you want to take to bed. I remember liking it, if not as memorably as some of his other works (The Autumn of the Patriarch remains my favorite: we die as much as when our illusions do as when we lose our memory). It should have ended there. And yet that’s not what brings me to Garcia-Marquez today. Rather, it’s the heroine of his Until August, named Anna Magdalena Bach. In a New York Times piece about the book and the sons’ decision to issue it, not once is Anna Magdalena’s name alluded to for what it is: J.S. Bach’s second wife, who gave him something close to two dozen children, and to whom he gave something close to two dozen sublime little musical pieces that have been collected as “The Anna Magdalena Notebook.” Listent o any of those pieces, and you’ll want to take that melancholy whoredom to bed: it’s that good, if not necessarily considered among Bach’s greater works. We do know that he did not write the pieces without his full capacities. He never lived long enough to lose his mind, only long enough to make us lose ours when we hear him. And he as born on March 21, a date we normally celebrate for that very reason, on March 21, but yesterday we had to devote this space to Alvin Jackson. I don’t know why Garcia-Marquez named his protagonist after Anna Magdalena. But there’s got to be a reason, and that reason alone may be why I might end up buying the book. What is more certain is that he had a thing about music, Garcia-Marquez did. He said he wrote The Autumn of the Patriarch while listening, over and over, to Bartok’s third piano concertos. That’ll have to wait. Today, it’s all about Anna Magdalena, which my own reluctantly, reparably autumnal friend Bob should take with him next time he’s hooked up to the poison drip.
—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.
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Al-Anon Family Groups
For the full calendar, go here.
With four young children to raise, Bach, like his father before him, lost no time in finding a new wife. Aged twenty, Anna Magdalena Wilcke was a professional singer employed at the court of Saxe-Weissenfels and came from musical stock. Their wedding was held ‘at home, by command of the Prince’, midweek in December 1721, to allow the musicians to get back to their posts in time for their Sunday services after imbibing the copious wine that Bach had ordered at the cost of nearly two months’ salary. Other than the fact that Anna Magdalena was fond of gardening (and especially of yellow carnations) and of birds (especially linnets), we know pitifully little about her. Eight days after the wedding Prince Leopold also married – to the Princess of Anhalt-Berenburg, someone who disliked music and was later referred to by Bach as being an amusa – a bit of an airhead.53 The long-term prospects in Cöthen were beginning to look shaky. With a new wife and children to educate, Bach was on the lookout for a new opening. We are coming full circle back to his Leipzig appointment.
–From John Eliot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven (2013).
Pogo says
@Made in China (pronounced Gina)
“Donald Trump could earn a windfall of $3 billion or more — eventually, at least — if shareholders in Digital World Acquisition Corp. on Friday vote to approve a merger with the former president’s social media company.
The vote by DWAC shareholders comes about two-and-a-half years after the so-called special purpose acquisition company announced plans to merge with Trump Media & Technology Group, the private firm that owns the Truth Social app platform…”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/trump-windfall-could-top-3-billion-after-shareholder-vote-on-social-media-merger/ar-BB1kmf0I?ocid=nl_article_link
Warning: Big Words
“Digital World Acquisition Corp…”
“…On September 3, 2021, DWAC commenced trading on the Nasdaq, after selling 25 million shares in its IPO.[1]
On October 20, 2021, DWAC and Trump Media & Technology Group announced that they had entered into a definitive merger agreement that would combine the two entities, allowing TMTG to become a publicly traded company. DWAC was created with the help of ARC Capital, a Shanghai-based firm specializing in listing Chinese companies on American stock markets that has been a target of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) investigations for misrepresenting shell corporations.[2][3][4] Some investors were surprised to learn that their investment money was being used to finance a Trump company.[5] In 2021, the DWAC Trump venture was linked with another company, China Yunhong Holdings, based in Wuhan, Hubei,[6][7] until its lead banker who was running the merger promised to sever ties with China in December 2021, stating that Yunhong was to “dissolve and liquidate”.[8][9] In February 2022, Reuters reported that the connection between Shanghai-based ARC Capital and Digital World was more extensive than thought, with ARC having offered money to get the SPAC off the ground.[9]…”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_World_Acquisition_Corp
MAGA (Make America Ginese After all)