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Weather: Mostly sunny. Highs in the upper 80s. Southwest winds 5 to 10 mph. Tuesday Night: Mostly cloudy. Lows in the upper 60s. Southwest winds 10 to 15 mph. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
Donald Andrew Sharp Sentencing at 8:30 a.m. in Courtroom 401 before Circuit Judge Terence Perkins, at the Flagler County courthouse. A jury found Sharp guilty on all seven counts he was charged with, including five life felonies for raping a child. The judge will have little discretion but to sentence Sharp to life in prison. See:
- “Jury Finds Andrew Sharp, 22, Guilty of Raping His 9-Year-Old Cousin and Faces Life in Prison.”
- In Trial’s Opening, Prosecution Describes Andrew Sharp, 22, as Babysitter Turned Sexual Predator on His Own Young Cousins
- Babysitter Accused of Turning Predator Against Children in His Care Confronts His Most Damning Witness: Himself
The Flagler County School Board meets at 3 p.m. in workshop to go over the items on its upcoming school board meeting two weeks hence. The board meets in the training room on the third floor of the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. Board meeting documents are available here.
The Flagler Beach Library Writers’ Club meets at 5 p.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach.
Flagler Beach’s Planning and Architectural Review Board meets at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall, 105 S 2nd Street. For agendas and minutes, go here.
The Palm Coast City Council meets at 6 p.m. at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For meeting agendas, audio and video, go here.
The Bunnell Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board meets at 6 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. The board consists of Carl Lilavois, Chair; Manuel Madaleno, Nealon Joseph, Gary Masten and Lyn Lafferty.
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy, 8 p.m. at Cinematique Theater, 242 South Beach Street, Daytona Beach. General admission is $8.50. Every Tuesday and on the first Saturday of every month the Random Acts of Insanity Comedy Improv Troupe specializes in performing fast-paced improvised comedy.
 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: We all know the mind twister: if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, has it fallen? Does the tree–does the forest–exist? Let’s take it a step further: does anything exist beyond language, separate from the language that describes it? Is the thing itself the thing, or is the language describing it what makes it what we take to be the thing? (After all there’s a neurological parallel here, as Oliver Sacks described it in the fascinating piece for The New Yorker in 1993, “To See or Not To See”–that was the print version’s title–where he explains that what we see is itself a construct that the brain learns to piece together in our early months, before which everything we “see” would be incomprehensible to our understanding of seeing. It would all be disparate shapes and objects that are more like unassembled puzzle pieces than tables, chairs, hands, trees.) Aren’t our entire lives, the entirety of our knowledge up to and including what we call direct experience—which we verbalize to ourselves, but which has no tangible reality until it is told in spoken or written or signed language, until it is shared—made of language? All we know, we know from others: from the language of a companion, a book, a documentary, a history, a testimony. To take an example: Nothing that happens in court, arbiter of so many fates, happens without language in some form. There is no lived experience divorced from it. Even body cam footage that may be without narration is immediately framed by the attorneys within the language of interpretation: were you in fear for your life in that moment. Did you mistake the perfume bottle for a gun. (Not an invention, by the way: that’s how US Marshals gunned down Cory Tanner in Espanola in 2015.) Attorneys hate to put children or any victim of sexual abuse on the stand because the mere act of verbalizing the abuse re-lives it. Obviously it’s preposterous to claim that without language there is no abuse, there’s no killing, no cancer, no joy, no experience of life in all its varieties and extremes. But what I’m suggesting is that the knowledge of those things, what makes them shared experiences, aware to others, what takes them out of the isolation of living them alone (or of being unheard victims, the way Melville in Redburn describes his fear of drowning at the bottom of the ocean, “stark alone, with the great waves rolling over me, and no one in the wide world knowing that I was there”) is language, and only language. In unnerving ways, that makes language in some ways more consequential than experience, if the experience is to be known, if it is to mean anything beyond itself, if it is to make us solidary with it: who among us could possibly know either what Guernica was about, or what horrors it entailed, if it weren’t for the language of Picasso’s “Guernica” (a tapestry of which, last I knew, hung high in or at the entrance of the chamber of the UN Security Council, as a reminder all 15 member nations duly ignore.) For art is the ultimate human language, being universal. But is is also true, as Italo Calvino wrote (in Invisible Cities), that “there is no language without deceit.”
—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
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Al-Anon Family Groups
For the full calendar, go here.
He that increases knowledge increases sorrow.
–From Ecclesiastes, 1:18.
Pogo says
@FWIW
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbtBH1kU2wg
Related
As stated
https://www.google.com/search?q=Norman+Maclean
As stated
https://www.google.com/search?q=William+Wordsworth
ASF says
Is it supposed to be a coincidence that the above featured political cartoon features what looks to be a Star of David?
Ray W. says
Yes, Star of David emphasizes the conspiracy theory of Jewish space lasers affecting the popular vote against Trump, but only in the six swing states. Every Republican in 2020 who was elected to an office other than the presidency was elected with zero election interference. But many of those who weren’t elected have their own theories of election interference. A space satellite has to be the platform for the laser. Otherwise, the conspiracy theory doesn’t work. I didn’t make up the crazy conspiracy, but I remember it and recognize the meaning the editorial cartoonist wished to inspire. To me, all of the crazy conspiracy theories are “way out there.” Hence, the apropos use of a satellite. It’s nuts to make up such a theory and nuts to believe in it. The crazy conspiracy theory of Jewish space lasers demeans Judaism and is wrong, but here we are, amidst dozens of other crazy conspiracy theories. All to support the Big Lie.