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Weather: Sunny with a chance of showers. Thunderstorms likely in the afternoon. Highs in the upper 90s. Chance of rain 60 percent. Friday Night: Mostly clear. Showers and thunderstorms likely in the evening. Lows in the lower 70s. Chance of rain 60 percent.
- 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: Elizabeth Tremoglie Sentencing at 9:30 a.m. in Courtroom 402 at the Flagler County courthouse. Tremoglie was charged with aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, resulting in bodily harm, a charge she insistently refuted. But a jury found her guilty of a lesser charge, felony battery, in a one-day trial on April 12. The charge she was found guilty on is a third degree felony, as opposed to a second degree felony, limiting her maximum exposure to five years in prison, as opposed to 15. Judge Bryan Feigenbaum presided over the trial.
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: Flagler County Emergency Management Director Jonathan Lord and National Weather Service-Jacksonville director Scott Cordero, talking about the coming hurricane season. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM and 1550 AM.
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.
First Friday in Flagler Beach, the monthly festival of music, food and leisure, is scheduled for this evening at Downtown’s Veterans Park, 105 South 2nd Street, from 5 to 9 p.m. The event is overseen by the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency and run by Laverne M. Shank Jr. and Surf 97.3.
Free Family Art Night: “Textured Turtles”, Ormond Memorial Art Museum and Gardens, 78 East Granada Boulevard, Ormond Beach. All art supplies are provided. No art experience is needed, and all ages are welcome. Free Family Art Night is a popular, monthly program typically scheduled on the first Friday of each month to coordinate with the free, family-friendly movie shown outdoors at Rockefeller Gardens. The two programs offer a stimulating evening for families, at no charge, in the heart of downtown Ormond Beach. Our art program takes place in the OMAM Classroom, rain or shine, but the City’s outdoor movies are weather dependent. Movie information can be found here or call The Casements at 386-676-3216.
 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: We are all, always, a bundle of evocations: the sight of a telephone pole crooked just this way or that might recall a long-buried memory. The tar smell on that wooden pole might, as it occasionally does for me, bring me back to my childhood summers in the hills of Lebanon, where the tar on utility poles bewildered me, and smelled strangely pleasant, for something so blackishly pungent. Maybe that’s why I am still so fond of the utility pole outside our house on Postman Lane, or of Updike’s Telephone Poles and Other Poems, his 1979 collection (1979: a year with endless evocations, not least my permanent arrival on these shores that July 19). As I opened the book to the title poem, I found the picture you see above tucked in there like a bookmark. I vaguely remember taking the picture in Virginia City maybe, where Cheryl and I got married, but I’m not sure if before or after our wedding, or during. The pole just centered so along the peak of the mountain behind, its jumble of wires–electricity, chatter, media–good enough to weave a matrimonial quilt. I reread Updike’s poem, and some of the lines he intended to stand out do: “struts, nuts, insulators and such… These weathered encrustations of electrical debris–/Each a Gorgon’s head, which, seized right,/Could stun us to stone.” (and I now think unkindly: Stun us to stone: clever alliteration, but is stone the best he could do?) My favorite line: “What other tree can you climb where the bird’s twitter,/Unscrambled, is English?” At the bottom of the page, I scribbled: See Lewis’s Main Street p. 368. Evocations everywhere I turn, everywhere I take notes, this one apparently dating from October 17, 1991, because another note tells me I copied the poem to a pre-internet notebook that day. As for Main Street, which I have just retrieved, the note must’ve been referring to this: “The telegraph wires thrummed, thrummed, thrummed above them; the rails were glaring hard lines; the goldenrod smelled dusty.” Not the only line Lewis devoted to poles, it turns out: “The street was cluttered with electric-light poles, telephone poles, gasoline pumps for motor cars, boxes of goods. Each man had built with the most valiant disregard of all the others,” we read near the beginning of the book as he describes Gopher Prairie. These are the smells, the sights, the cadences of America, as if connected across time and space by wires, the wires of our memory, of our memories’ evocations, all from a synapse: aren;t our evocations our own little chain reactions, so much safer than the other kind–assuming we do not lose control (what are paranoids and schizophrenics but the innocent victims of uncontrolled chain reactions of the mind, Edward Teller’s synaptical playthings?) This entire entry was itself evoked by these lines from Calvino’s Invisible Cities: “The quantity of things that could be read in a little piece of smooth and empty wood overwhelmed Kublai; Polo was already talking about ebony forests, about rafts laden with logs that come down the river, of docks, of women at the windows.” When I read that line, I thought of the only T.S. Eliot poem I know and understand, at least superficially: Morning at the Window.
They are rattling breakfast plates in basement kitchens,
And along the trampled edges of the street
I am aware of the damp souls of housemaids
Sprouting despondently at area gates.
The brown waves of fog toss up to me
Twisted faces from the bottom of the street,
And tear from a passer-by with muddy skirts
An aimless smile that hovers in the air
And vanishes along the level of the roofs.
Only the telephone poles are missing.
—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.
Scenic A1A Pride Meeting
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Blue 24 Forum
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Flagler County’s Cold-Weather Shelter Opens
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.
They have been with us a long time.
They will outlast the elms.
Our eyes, like the eyes of a savage sieving the trees
In his search for game,
Run through them. They blend along small-town streets
Like a race of giants that have faded into mere mythology.
Our eyes, washed clean of belief,
Lift incredulous to their fearsome crowns of bolts, trusses,
struts, nuts, insulators, and such
Barnacles as compose
These weathered encrustations of electrical debris¬
Each a Gorgon’s head, which, seized right,
Could stun us to stone.
Yet they are ours. We made them.
See here, where the cleats of linemen
Have roughened a second bark
Onto the bald trunk. And these spikes
Have been driven sideways at intervals handy for human legs.
The Nature of our construction is in every way
A better fit than the Nature it displaces
What other tree can you climb where the birds’ twitter,
Unscrambled, is English? True, their thin shade is negligible,
But then again there is not that tragic autumnal
Casting-off of leaves to outface annually.
These giants are more constant than evergreens
By being never green.
—–John Updike’s “Telephone Poles,” from Telephone Poles and Other Poems (1979).
Howard Goldstein says
Lots of Black and Brown faces in that cartoon and not represented in a good way .. concerning
Pierre Tristam says
Would you rather the cartoonist falsely represented the racist demographics of mass incarceration as rather dominated by white inmates? Should we be supremacists–or disinforming–to that absurd degree?
Jim says
It’s a cartoon about the Orange Monster being incarcerated for his 34 felony convictions. You really have to be looking hard for something to criticize to object to showing black, brown, white (maybe other?) fellow convicts in a CARTOON!!!
I do think Trump will look good in an orange jumpsuit, though….
Laurel says
Orange is the new Orange. “Nothing like this has ever happened before!” Well, no one has ever pulled the schemes that Orangie has pulled before, so no surprise there.
He wears orange makeup to give himself some color. If he didn’t, everyone would see how faded and out of shape he is. The hair is thinning up front, and if he didn’t paint his face and lacquer his hair, Biden would start to look really good (since they are only three years apart in age). But the Democrats, who love to shoot themselves in the foot, still say “Biden’s too old.” Because we cannot have a black woman fill in if needed? Damn, we don’t even know who Orangie wants for VP should he kick the bucket in office.
No logic there whatsoever.