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Weather: Mostly sunny. Thunderstorms likely with a chance of showers in the afternoon. Highs in the mid 90s. South winds around 5 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent. Heat index values up to 105. Saturday Night: Mostly cloudy with a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the evening, then partly cloudy with a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms after midnight. Lows in the mid 70s. South 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:
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.
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. Special guest today: Public Works Supervisor Jennifer Crews, who will talk about stormwater and wastewater issues. All subjects, all interested residents or non-residents welcome.
Second Saturday Plant Sale at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park, 6400 North Oceanshore Blvd., Palm Coast, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Flowers, bushes and hard to find plants. The event is sponsored by the Friends of Washington Oaks. Regular entrance fee applies: $4 per vehicle with one person aboard, $5 for vehicles with more than one person.
Gamble Jam: Musicians of all ages can bring instruments and chairs and join in the jam session, 2 to 5 p.m. . Program is free with park admission! Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area at Flagler Beach, 3100 S. Oceanshore Blvd., Flagler Beach, FL. Call the Ranger Station at (386) 517-2086 for more information. The Gamble Jam is a family-friendly event that occurs every second and fourth Saturday of the month. The park hosts this acoustic jam session at one of the pavilions along the river to honor the memory of James Gamble Rogers IV, the Florida folk musician who lost his life in 1991 while trying to rescue a swimmer in the rough surf.
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Monthly Meeting, 11 a.m. at Cypress Knoll Golf Club, 53 Easthampton Blvd, Palm Coast. A monthly speaker is featured. Lunch is available for $20 in cash, $21 by credit card, but must be ordered in advance. The lunch menu is available on our website. Lunch may be ordered by sending an email to: [email protected].
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.
 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. |
Notebook: Apocalyptic literature is as old as the Epic of Gilgamesh. Older still, if we could tap into pre-literate oral traditions. Someone somewhere must have written a story about how every word ever spoken on earth as it might have been in the rest of heavens–every song, every wail, every scream of pain and happiness, every burp and hiccup, every fart and ode to joy–is floating around in the universe, grooving dark matter like the ones and zeros of computer magic that, once bytten just so, replay the sounds entire. It’s like that Golden Record of the “Sounds of Earth” on Voyager I and II, but for all existence. What are we hearing in that cosmic microwave background radiation if not the beginning of the universe, the echo of the big bang? If then, why not since? In that ultimate library of creation must be floating the first sounds of Homo habilis, handyman of 3 million years ago, which could probably be translated to say: where the hell am I, and take cover! Prerequisite to survival, instinctive fear of death preceded reflection. Only survival allowed the first fear to be verbalized, and with it the first fear that the world is bound to end: surely that sky can’t hold itself up. Even Homo erectus’s ancestors could see that. Our ancestors were right. They intuited then in fugitive synapses what we can now footnote in journal articles, not more, and certainly not much less. Science filled in some details. We now know that the sky will quite literally fall: in 5 billion years our lucky old sun will swell into a red giant, gobbling up Earth, and that’ll be that. What our ancestors did not know, what they could not imagine–although the impulse to bash the next-hole cave-dweller’s head in for a shtup too far might have been a hint–that the end would not come from the exterior. It would not be, as latter-day apocalypses would fancy it to be a clash between earthly powers and the deity. It would be nothing so absolving. We would be our own executioners.
—P.T.
Now this: Voyager Golden Record. Complete audio and images.
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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.
The deaths on Iwo were extraordinarily violent. There seemed to be no clean wounds; just fragments of corpses. It reminded one battalion medical officer of a Bellevue dissecting room. Often the only way to distinguish between Japanese and Marine dead was by the legs; Marines wore canvas leggings and Nips khaki puttees. Otherwise identification was completely impossible. You tripped over strings of viscera fifteen feet long, over bodies which had been cut in half at the waist. Legs and arms, and heads bearing only necks, lay fifty feet from the closest torsos.
–From William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War (1979).
Pogo says
@Word of the day
https://www.google.com/search?q=defeatist
“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar