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Weather: Mostly sunny. A chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the upper 90s. West winds around 5 mph. Chance of rain 50 percent. Heat index up to 102. Monday Night: Mostly cloudy with a chance of showers. A chance of thunderstorms, mainly in the evening. Lows in the lower 70s. Southwest winds around 5 mph. Chance of rain 50 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: It’s trial week. Here are the possible contenders.
The Flagler County Commission meets in workshop at 1 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. It will refine its proposal for a beach-protection tax, and discuss the proposed budgets of constitutional officers, which are each approved by the County Commission. Again, the county has not posted the back-up material on its website, denying the public an opportunity to review the material in possession of commissioners.
The Flagler County Library Board of Trustees meets at 4:30 p.m. at the Flagler County Public Library, 2500 Palm Coast Pkwy NW, Palm Coast. The meeting of the seven-member board is open to the public.
The Bunnell City Commission meets at 7 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell, where the City Commission is holding its meetings until it is able to occupy its own City Hall on Commerce Parkway in 2025. To access meeting agendas, materials and minutes, go here.
Nar-Anon Family Groups offers hope and help for families and friends of addicts through a 12-step program, 6 p.m. at St. Mark by the Sea Lutheran Church, 303 Palm Coast Pkwy NE, Palm Coast, Fellowship Hall Entrance. See the website, www.nar-anon.org, or call (800) 477-6291. Find virtual meetings here.
 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: It’s shocking—is there a better term?—that we live in a “city” of 100,000, but a “city” of that size without a single general interest bookstore (like porn shops, religious bookstores don’t count), not a single art museum, not a symphony orchestra, and of course nothing remotely approximating a cultural center. To the contrary. We have lost four major cultural organizations since Covid (the Palm Coast Arts Foundation, JJ Graham’s Salvo Art Project, the Flagler County Art League, the Flagler Film Festival that had fledgling made a go of it for a few Januaries). Palm Coast had an excuse in its early goings. It was born in the late 60s, it needed time, people, fermentation. The city’s comprehensive plan re-write has a gaping hole at its heart, a big silence on culture and the arts, except in pro forma nods here and there. The city is preparing to celebrate its 25th anniversary with many monuments to personal fitness and environmental indulgence, which are no small things (its vaunted trails, its new “Rec Center,” its homages to pickle ball), but all the infrastructure it put in place to nurture the arts–the United We Art organization, the arts district in Town Center, the county’s Cultural Council known as FC3) keep talking about it without having the means, or being given the means–like a special arts and culture tax, as in Volusia–to do something. There ought to be an excise tax on hospitals and assisted living facilities: every room in those places should pay an arts and culture impact fee. The logic? We’re more than age. Let age fertilize culture. What else can we leave future generations? Quiet desperation with nice trails is still quiet desperation.
—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.
Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.
–From Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961).
Pogo says
@FWIW
Meet Trump’s New Christian Kingpin
https://www.yahoo.com/news/meet-trump-christian-kingpin-140000521.html
Related
As stated
https://www.google.com/search?q=more+money+than+god
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
— C. S. Lewis
Pogo says
@FWIW, again
Meet Trump’s New Christian Kingpin
Oil-rich Tim Dunn has changed Texas politics with fanatical zeal — the national stage is next
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/tim-dunn-texas-oil-billionaire-trump-donor-1235033143/
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
— C. S. Lewis