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Weather: Sunny. A chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the lower 90s. Light and variable winds, becoming east 5 to 10 mph in the afternoon. Chance of rain 50 percent. Heat index values up to 106. Saturday Night: Partly cloudy with a slight chance of thunderstorms. A chance of showers in the evening, then a slight chance of rain after midnight. Lows in the mid 70s. Southeast winds 5 to 10 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:
The Flagler Beach All Stars hold their monthly beach clean-up starting at 9 a.m. in front of the Flagler Beach pier. All volunteers welcome.
Coffee With Commissioner Scott Spradley: Flagler Beach Commission Chairman Scott Spradley hosts his weekly informal town hall with coffee and doughnuts at 9 a.m. at his law office at 301 South Central Avenue, Flagler Beach. All subjects, all interested residents or non-residents welcome. The gatherings occasionally feature a special guest.
Sunshine and Sandals Social at Cornerstone: Every first Saturday we invite new residents out to learn everything about Flagler County at Cornerstone Center, 608 E. Moody Blvd, Bunnell, 1 to 2:30 p.m. We have a great time going over dog friendly beaches and parks, local social clubs you can be a part of as well as local favorite restaurants.
The Saturday Flagler Beach Farmers Market is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at Wickline Park, 315 South 7th Street, featuring prepared food, fruit, vegetables , handmade products and local arts from more than 30 local merchants. The market is hosted by Flagler Strong, a non-profit.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The food pantry is organized by Pastor Charles Silano and Grace Community Food Pantry, a Disaster Relief Agency in Flagler County. Feeding Northeast Florida helps local children and families, seniors and active and retired military members who struggle to put food on the table. Working with local grocery stores, manufacturers, and farms we rescue high-quality food that would normally be wasted and transform it into meals for those in need. The Flagler County School District provides space for much of the food pantry storage and operations. Call 386-586-2653 to help, volunteer or donate.
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.
Bandshell Sounds of the Summer Concert Series: The U.S. Bee Gees Tribute: 7:15 p.m. at the Bandshell, 70 Boardwalk Avenue, Daytona Beach. Free. This 5-piece band features the precise vocal blend, and musicianship, of Todd Pitts, Greg Pitts and Ken Custalow as the brothers Gibb. The sibling harmonies of the Pitts brothers makes for an even higher caliper of vocal blending. This combined with an energetic stage performance continues to thrill audiences everywhere. The 2024 concert lineup includes tributes of all genres, including country, rock n’ roll, disco & funk, Motown and R&B.
 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: You’re familiar of course with those drink cups the size of shipping containers sold at every roadside diabetes accelerant, those Buc-ees buckets we worship like modern relics from more modern Constantinoples, those 32 or 64-ounce horrors that Saturday Night live recently immortalized as Big Dumb Cups and that one day may be the stuff of wonder in archeological digs, a few thousand years from now, if and when humanity recovers from the twin calamities of a nuclear holocaust and global warming’s big melt. I was looking at mine recently and was struck by how evocative it was, but I couldn’t think of what. There, standing so erect, so beguilingly black, so domineering and seductive. I looked, I touched, my eyes danced around it, I thought of sipping from it (it is filled exclusively with water: other drinks deign not be so dumbed down). I went back to reading something, then to looking at it again. You know how it is, when you can’t think of an actor’s name or what book you read such and such a scene from. The evocation is storing, the source is fleeting. Then it struck me. Of course. Big, dumb cup. Monkeys. The origin of species. The beginning of it all.
—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.
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
Nar-Anon Family Group
Flagler County Beekeepers Association Meeting
Bunnell City Commission Meeting
For the full calendar, go here.
At the most fundamental level, the obese body is like a four-cylinder car pulling a trailer full of bricks; it is, in the simplest sense, overloaded. Its “cylinders” – the heart and its ancillary arteries and veins – are not built for pulling the extra weight, and so must work harder, straining to accommodate the load. Its fuel injection system – the pancreas, the liver, and all of the organs that process fuel – are similarly overloaded, unable to process enough energy or to get it to the proper place to be used to fire the body’s key muscles. Its chassis – the skeleton – groans under the excess weight, and like a car with bad shocks, begins to jangle and bump with the most minute movements.
–From Greg Crister’s Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (2003).
Ray W. says
A couple of short years ago, tiny number of FlaglerLive commenters bemoaned their perceived decline of the American crude oil refinery system. To them, the issue of higher gasoline prices was not the fault of OPEC+ voluntarily cutting production, it was not the fault of American shale oil companies colluded with OPEC+ or not, it was not the fault of Russia invading the Ukraine, with the attendant effect of sanctions on world crude oil supply. No, the rise in gasoline prices, in their minds, came from less gasoline output from American oil refineries.
On March 18, 2024, the EIA released a report reflecting two straight years of rising output by American refinery owners. Last year, due to completion of a 240,000-bpd expansion of refinery capacity at ExxonMobil’s Beaumont refinery, total capacity at the plant grew to 609,000 bpd.
Overall American refining capacity rose by 324,000 bpd in 2023 to 18.4 mbpd. The American record was set in January 2020 at 19 mbpd.
In another article, the EIA reported that the 13.4 mbpd average U.S. crude oil production rate in early 2024 was the highest extraction rate ever for any country in the history of crude oil extraction.
For those who claim we cannot meet clean energy goals, consider what happens when technological developments occur that radically change the energy marketplace.
In 2008, America averaged a production rate of 5 million barrels of crude oil per day. 16 years later, we are at 13.4 million bpd. Technological advances in 3-D seismic imaging, in horizontal drilling, and in chemical improvements in fracking compounds revolutionized the shale oil industry.
In January 2016, American energy producers exported zero liquified natural gas (LNG). In a little over 8 years, we have become the world’s largest exporter of LNG.
In 2016, Congress repealed a 1977 stature prohibiting the export of U.S. crude oil. Today, we are exporting millions of barrels of crude oil per day.
Long overdue investment in solar and wind turbine technology is giving us new generation solar cells and turbine blades that promise significant increases in generating output, at a lower cost. Yes, America should have begun the search for new technologies decades ago, but it is happening. Right now, if an electricity generating plant must be built, solar farms are the cheapest way to generate electricity, by far.
AI programming consumes vast amounts of electricity. We are still adding 3 million new people to our population each year, even though American women fell below replacement birth rates 17 years ago (yes, the innumerate among us just can’t grasp the idea that we need millions of immigrants each year to meet ever growing labor demands from our unexpectedly strong economy. Gullible to the end, they bark and bark of the perception of harm to the economy, not realizing they are trying to undermine our economy). These new people consume electricity. Block-change currency exchanges consume their own huge amounts of electricity. Growing sales of EVs place growing demands on electricity.
We are going to have to build a lot of new electricity generating plants to meet rising electricity demand, but there is little reason to doubt that the genius of the marketplace will provide answers that today seem pie-in-the-sky.