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Weather: Mostly sunny with a chance of showers with a slight chance of thunderstorms. Highs in the lower 90s. North winds around 5 mph, becoming northeast in the afternoon. Chance of rain 50 percent. Friday Night: Partly cloudy in the evening, then becoming mostly clear. A slight chance of thunderstorms. A chance of showers, mainly in the evening. Lows in the lower 70s. East winds around 5 mph in the evening, becoming light and variable. 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:
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 it’s all about the beach-renourishment project in Flagler Beach, with County Coastal Engineer Ansley Wren-Key and the U.S. Army Corps’ David Ruderman, plus Gerry James, a candidate for Florida Senate. 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.
LGBTQ+ Night at Flagler Beach’s Coquina Coast Brewing Company: The monthly LGBTQ+ social for adults is scheduled for every second Friday of the month from 8 to 11 p.m. at Coquina Coast Brewing Co., 318 Moody Boulevard, Flagler Beach, assuming the disintegration of Flagler Pride hasn’t affected it. “Come together, make new friends and share some brews. Going strong since Oct 2021! We feature many genres of local LGBTQ+ talent in our community; comedy, burlesque, belly dance, drag, musicians, bingo games, etc. There is never a cover charge but donations are greatly appreciated! When you register, your email is used to keep you up to date on future LGBTQ+ friendly events.
Tangents: The other day I was attending a mediation at the Government Services Building, our little gardenless and soulless Versailles in Bunnell, where bureaucracy blooms. After four hours of it, including some entertaining hubris from one of the parties at the table (if we don’t get what we want, we’ll sue), I needed to micturate, a word I learned reading Anthony Burgess: who else? Though what does it say about me that I can remember it from Little Wilson and Big God back in 1987? That, and the word proleptic, which I use for kicks once in a while when I get bored with whichever board or commission I’m covering. To verify my memory I just pulled out Little Wilson from the shelf downstairs–the bookshelves miraculously spared by our Falling Waters incident from a few weeks back–and sure enough, here it is, on page 25: “I would go into all the bedrooms and micturate in all the chamberpots.” I had underlined the word and exclaimed in the margin: “! Never thought ‘urinate’ had a synonym.” How little I knew back then. How little more I know now. Not just about pissing’s Oxford English progenies. Though it’s worth knowing: the word may not have as many synonyms as does, supposedly, snow in the language of eskimos, but it has this: discharge, egest, eject, eliminate, evacuate, expel, exudate, give off, tinkle, leak, leak pass, produce, secrete, throw off, void. We did not have online thesauruses back then in 1987 Chapel Hill, as I read Little Wilson at what was then Hardback Cafe, my daily pilgrimage to avoid as many classes as I could.) As always, that’s not what I’m here to note. I went to the third-floor bathroom inside the now-locked fortress of the county administration offices. And what did I see but the bookshelf you see atop this tangent. Empty. Eying the bookshelf from the side as I went in gave me a jolt of pleasure: a bookshelf in a government bathroom! Yes! But seeing it so entirely, so grimly empty (discharged, egested, ejected, dejecting, evacuated, expelled, exudated, leaky, void) my heart sank further than my bladder. That lone magazine, so pathetic by itself, its subject making it even more pathetic, made the bookshelf look like a mattress reincarnated–that mattress you saw on the back of a poor World War II or Balkan or Palestinian refugee fleeing bombing somewhere. That’s what this bookshelf looked like. A lifeless refugee. Couldn’t a building so thickly stocked with well-paid functionaries have yielded a few rejects from home libraries? The odd hardback, a few paperbacks, the never-read Melvilles and (if you believe in miracles) Burgess’s Enderby quartet? But no. I wondered whether Holly Albanese, our fearless library director, had any idea this small crime against humanity was here perpetrated, so emblematic it is of our soulless culture, our incapacity to think further than trailer life. Or Trailer Life, as the case may be. The mediation was depressing enough. But this was crushing. It was one of the saddest micturations of my life. Veni vidi pipi it was not.
—P.T.
Now this: The empty bookshelf at least led to one small good thing, to borrow Carver’s phrase from an even grimmer context: the discovery of Clifford Sargent’s Better Than Food, which may become a regular feature in this space. At least it’ll give our GSB friends some ideas about what to put in that lonely shelf.
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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.
December 2025
Holiday Plant Class Series
Holiday Sale to Benefit Area Homeless
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Flagler Beach All Stars Beach Clean-Up
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
John’s Towing 35-Year Celebration at Joan B. King Park
Flagler Beach Holiday at the Beach Parade
Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Palm Coast’s Starlight Parade in Town Center
‘Annie,’ at Limelight Theatre
‘Greetings,’ A Christmas Comedy
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
For the full calendar, go here.
No, this is a tightly focused overview of how, over the past two millennia, scrolls and bound volumes have been housed, arranged and cared for. Normally, even the most well-disposed reader could be excused for assuming that such a topic might be just a teeny bit limited in appeal. Yet just as Nicholson Baker can pronounce a moving elegy to the card catalogue, so Petroski manages to support his personal feelings about book storage with telling historical anecdotes — and to offset his engineer’s fascination with load, sag, lighting and shelf construction with quite lyrical passages from that obsessive biblio-visionary, Melvil Dewey (he of the Decimal System). As our genial and learned guide notes, what makes the history of technology so fascinating is that “it not only teaches us about the way things used to be done, it also gives us perspective on how things are done today — and how they most likely will be done in the future.” As a result, The Book on the Bookshelf can be relished even by those who don’t aspire to a degree in librarianship. You do, I suppose, have to care about books.
—-From Michael Dirda’s review of Henry Petroski’s The Book on the Bookshelf, The Washington Post, Sept. 12, 1999.
Pogo says
@FWIW
Time for an encore…
https://www.google.com/search?q=farenheit+451
Pogo says
@There will be blood
https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-guns-bump-stocks-b3bd1b4163d78514a6d5acc5b44c8b3d
“Find something you love and let it kill you.”
— Charles Bukowski
Ray W. says
The Hardback Cafe! Was it the closest thing to European culture American academia had to offer the young stumbling idealist, nee wordsmith? Not quite the coffeehouses of Paris, Vienna, Berlin and Prague of the mid-19th century for fermenting anarchistic, socialistic, communistic minds as the poor university students of the day planned rebellion while debating the finer points of Hegel’s Trilogy, but plenty of fun nonetheless, I suppose. Me? Sadlack’s Deli, as an employee punching a clock. I needed the money, and I never went without food. Class of ’82.
We are all a sum of our past. Franklin Street hobos.
Pierre Tristam says
It was a whole era. I found this: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100057306858139&mibextid=LQQJ4d
Ray W. says
Thank you, Mr. Tristam. North Carolina is such a diversely populated state.
Vast swathes of tobacco farmers who thought themselves conservative as they accepted both federal handouts such as crop price supports and heavily subsidized hail insurance. Each fall Greensboro hosted the Tobacco Road Tournament between the Wolfpack, Demon Deacons, Tar Heels and Blue Devils.
Bastions of Quakers, who founded Greensboro in the 1760s, hippies who discovered Chapel Hill and Carrboro in the 60s and never left, and artists long congregating to Asheville, which still has a thriving scene; this formed the backbone of the clientele of the Hardback Cafe.
This was North Carolina’s counterbalance to those s0-called conservatives who favored federal subsidies for the privileged few who held state-controlled rights to grow certain acres of tobacco that passed from father to son for generations. Somehow, the so-called conservatives thought that limiting the amount of acreage devoted to tobacco would keep the crop prices high. But if the market floor for tobacco prices dropped too low, federal subsidies to the rescue. If hail hit, we all paid for the hail insurance payouts that the so-called conservative farmers received if they were far-ahead-thinking enough to pay the federally subsidized below market rate premiums for the hail insurance.
In my time at UNC, the Hardback building housed both a used bookstore and a laundromat where I would wash my laundry. Not that far from campus. I would load a duffel bag with clothes, grab a book, and ride a motorcycle up the hill from my apartment off the end of Cameron Street with the bag balanced on the gas tank, and spend an afternoon reading as I washed clothes. Sometimes, buy another used book. Not quite the beat-era holdover anarchistic music scene you experienced, but fun to me.
Pogo says
@On the other hand
Give a salute to the beer halls’ failed idealists too…
https://www.google.com/search?q=beer+hall+putsch
The war that continues to this day was begun in such places.