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Weather: Sunny. Highs in the upper 80s. Northeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Wednesday Night: Mostly clear. Lows in the upper 60s.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Flagler Beach here.
- tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
In court: An evidentiary hearing is scheduled before Circuit Judge Terence Perkins at 9 a.m. at the Flagler County courthouse in the case of George Proulx, 69, who was sentenced to four years in prison, followed by 11 on sex-offender probation, for molesting and having unlawful sex with runaway girls. Proulx is contesting his sentence. The hearing was continued from March 20. A status hearing is scheduled at 1:30 p.m. before Circuit Judge Terence Perkins in Courtroom 401 at the Flagler County Courthouse in the case of Marshall Thomas, the former Matanzas High School student accused of sexually assaulting a student during class. Separately, he faces three third-degree felony charges of grand theft, two of them grand theft of a firearm. See:
- “Ex-Matanzas Student Facing Adult Gun and Molestation Charges Here Is Attending High School in Wisconsin”
- Former Matanzas High Student, 16, Charged as Adult in Alleged Sex Assault of Girl During Class
- Dad’s Alert Over His Son’s Gun Thefts Leads to Arrest of Boys, 15 and 16, Before Confrontation
Stormwater Community Workshop for Flagler Beach Residents: 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Building Department, Wickline Center, 800 South Daytona Avenue, Flagler Beach. The city administration and engineers from McKim and Creed invite the public to a workshop to collect information and data about their properties and their stormwater concerns. Bring supporting documents and photographs. Call Chris Novak or Dale Martin at 386/517-2000 with questions.
Both Flagler County high schools hold their graduation ceremonies at the Ocean Center in Daytona Beach. The Matanzas High School ceremony begins at 3 p.m. and is scheduled to end at 4:30. The Flagler-Palm Coast High School ceremony begins at 7 p.m. The Tickets are required for admittance to these events. Families can visit the “Seniors” page on each high school website for additional details, including ticket and parking information, as well as instructions for graduating students. Both graduation ceremonies will be streamed live here.
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]
The Circle of Light Course in Miracles study group meets at a private residence in Palm Coast every Wednesday at 1:20 PM. There is a $2 love donation that goes to the store for the use of their room. If you have your own book, please bring it. All students of the Course are welcome. There is also an introductory group at 1:00 PM. The group is facilitated by Aynne McAvoy, who can be reached at [email protected] for location and information.
 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. |
Notably: Annie Jacobsen at the beginning of her new book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, chose to list the numerous interviews she had, as if to dramatize the fact that she interviewed top echelon officials and scholars in the field, and to emphasize the sort of unanimity she got from all of them that nuclear war is madness–but that we’re planning for it anyway. One of those interview subjects was especially arresting: Michael Morsch, described as a “Neolithic archeologist” at the university of Heidelberg. The book’s concluding pages do in fact suggest that a nuclear war would be followed by a return to the stone age–assuming there would be any human beings left to pick up the sticks and stones with which Albert Einstein said World War IV would be fought. But Morsch turns out to have been the discoverer of Gobekli Tepe, an archeological site in Turkey that upended our timeline of neolithic settlements, and our assumptions that it was all hunter-gathering before towns and cities were developed. Gobekli Tepe is a Stonehenge-like collection of monuments, an amphitheater, some sort of worshiping site. Dating back to around 11,500 years ago, the site, not uncovered until 2007, “is one of the first manifestations of human-made monumental architecture,” UNESCO writes on the site’s World Heritage page. “The site testifies to innovative building techniques, including the integration of frequently decorated T-shaped limestone pillars, which also fulfilled architectural functions. The imagery found at Göbekli Tepe, adorning T-pillars and some small finds (stone vessels, shaft-straighteners, etc.), is also found at contemporaneous sites in the Upper Mesopotamian region, thus testifying to a close social network in this core region of Neolithisation.” Jacobsen is suggesting precisely that: that our own civilizations may soon be buried under mounds of earth for thousands of years, maybe to be uncovered by future beings, human or otherwise, after we have wiped ourselves off the planet, as we surely will, at our current pace.
—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.
When German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt first began excavating on a Turkish mountaintop 25 years ago, he was convinced the buildings he uncovered were unusual, even unique. Atop a limestone plateau near Urfa called Gobekli Tepe, Turkish for “Belly Hill”, Schmidt discovered more than 20 circular stone enclosures. The largest was 20m across, a circle of stone with two elaborately carved pillars 5.5m tall at its centre. The carved stone pillars – eerie, stylised human figures with folded hands and fox-pelt belts – weighed up to 10 tons. Carving and erecting them must have been a tremendous technical challenge for people who hadn’t yet domesticated animals or invented pottery, let alone metal tools. The structures were 11,000 years old, or more, making them humanity’s oldest known monumental structures, built not for shelter but for some other purpose. […] Archaeologists had long thought complex ritual and organised religion were luxuries that societies developed only once they began domesticating crops and animals, a transition known as the Neolithic. Once they had a food surplus, the thinking went, they could devote their extra resources to rituals and monuments. Gobekli Tepe, Schmidt told me, turned that timeline upside down. The stone tools at the site, backed up by radiocarbon dates, placed it firmly in the pre-Neolithic era. More than 25 years after the first excavations there, there is still no evidence for domesticated plants or animals. And Schmidt didn’t think anyone lived at the site full-time. He called it a “cathedral on a hill”.
–From “An immense mystery older than Stonehenge,” by Andrew Curry, BBC Aug. 16, 2021.
Pogo says
@FWIW
T for Tesla?
“Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world. ”
― Archimedes