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Weather: Mostly sunny. A chance of showers and thunderstorms in the morning, then showers and thunderstorms likely in the afternoon. Highs in the mid 90s. Southwest winds around 5 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent. Heat index values up to 108. Monday Night: Partly cloudy. A chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly in the evening. 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:
In Court: It’s trial week, with the trial of Tyrese Patterson in priority for the court. Patterson faces a first-degree murder charge in the killing of Noah Smith, 16, in Bunnell in 2022. The trial begins with jury selection today before Circuit Judge Terence Perkins in Courtroom 401 at the Flagler County courthouse.
The three-member East Flagler Mosquito Control District Board meets at 10 a.m. at District Headquarters, 210 Airport Executive Drive, Palm Coast. Agendas are available here. District staff, commissioners and email addresses are here. The meetings are open to the public.
The Flagler County Canvassing Board meets today at the Flagler County Supervisor of Elections office, Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. The meeting is open to the public. Check the time in the sidebar or in this chart, which includes the full year’s meeting schedule (the pdf schedule does not include the dates and times of required Canvassing Board meetings which may be necessary due to a recount called locally or statewide.) The board is chaired by County Judge Andrea Totten. This Election Year’s board members are Supervisor of Elections Kaiti Lenhart and County Commissioner Dave Sullivan. The alternates are County Judge Melissa Distler and County Commissioner Donald O’Brien. March-April meetings are for the presidential preference primary, such as it is. See all legal notices from the Supervisor of Elections, including updated lists of those ineligible to vote, here.
The Flagler County Commission meets in workshop at 2 p.m. followed by a special meeting at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. The commission will discuss the county’s capital budget at the workshop, then set a proposed tax rate for next year. The tax rate the commission will set is only a benchmark, and the maximum tax rate it is willing to consider. It may set a lower tax rate by September, when it adopts the final rate. See the documents here, such as they are (the county continues to be stingy with back-up material it shares with the public, as opposed to what it shares with commissioners.)
The Flagler County Commission meets at 5 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 E. Moody Boulevard, Building 2, Bunnell. Access meeting agendas and materials here. The five county commissioners and their email addresses are listed 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.
Just Looking: “Frank Stella, Towering Artist and Master of Reinvention, Dies at 87,” read the May 4 obituary of the artist in the New York Times. “Mr. Stella was a dominant figure in postwar American art, a restless, relentless innovator whose explorations of color and form made him an outsize presence, endlessly discussed and constantly on exhibit. Few American artists of the 20th century arrived with quite his éclat. He was in his early 20s when his large-scale black paintings — precisely delineated black stripes separated by thin lines of blank canvas — took the art world by storm. Austere, self-referential, opaque, they cast a chilling spell. Writing in Art International magazine in 1960, the art historian William Rubin declared himself “almost mesmerized” by the “eerie, magical presence” of the paintings. Time only ratified the consensus.” Amazingly, coincidentally, the Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art has had a special Frank Stella exhibit since Feb. 29, running only through Aug. 18. From the museum: “Since his first solo gallery exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1960, when he presented his famous “Black Paintings”, Stella has continuously explored the possibilities of the expression of visual space. Initial paintings based on the rejection of the conventionally rectangular canvas, and of painting-as-representation, gave way to complex wall reliefs made from paint, cardboard, and felt. He further blurred the distinction between painting and sculpture in baroque works that seemed to leap off the wall. Most recently, Stella used digital modeling to explore how subtle changes in scale, color and material can affect our perception and experience of the free-standing object.” You can take a virtual tour here. Admission is $10 for all lesser humans who are not students, military, old or children–in other words, all those who’d be left behind on the Titanic.
—P.T.
Now this: Frank Stella on Charlie Rose:
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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.
January 2026
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Democratic Women’s Club
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
The Rainbow Bridge Dedication at Holland Park
‘Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,’ the Billie Holiday Story, at City Rep Theatre
Random Acts of Insanity’s Roundup of Standups from Around Central Florida
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
‘Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,’ the Billie Holiday Story, at City Rep Theatre
For the full calendar, go here.
After years of waiting, it was before me at last. The great face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as never any thing human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient. If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing—nothing but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond every thing of the present, and far into the past. It was gazing out over the ocean of Time—over lines of century-waves which, further and further receding, closed nearer and nearer together, and blended at last into one unbroken tide, away toward the horizon of remote antiquity. It was thinking of the wars of departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five thousand slow revolving years. It was the type of an attribute of man—of a faculty of his heart and brain. It was MEMORY—RETROSPECTION—wrought into visible, tangible form. All who know what pathos there is in memories of days that are accomplished and faces that have vanished—albeit only a trifling score of years gone by—will have some appreciation of the pathos that dwells in these grave eyes that look so steadfastly back upon the things they knew before History was born—before Tradition had being—things that were, and forms that moved, in a vague era which even Poetry and Romance scarce know of—and passed one by one away and left the stony dreamer solitary in the midst of a strange new age, and uncomprehended scenes. The Sphynx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its story. And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds of all ages, which reveals to one something of what he shall feel when he shall stand at last in the awful presence of God. There are some things which, for the credit of America, should be left unsaid, perhaps; but these very things happen sometimes to be the very things which, for the real benefit of Americans, ought to have prominent notice. While we stood looking, a wart, or an excrescence of some kind, appeared on the jaw of the Sphynx. We heard the familiar clink of a hammer, and understood the case at once. One of our well meaning reptiles—I mean relic-hunters—had crawled up there and was trying to break a “specimen” from the face of this the most majestic creation the hand of man has wrought. But the great image contemplated the dead ages as calmly as ever, unconscious of the small insect that was fretting at its jaw. Egyptian granite that has defied the storms and earthquakes of all time has nothing to fear from the tack-hammers of ignorant excursionists—highwaymen like this specimen. He failed in his enterprise. We sent a sheik to arrest him if he had the authority, or to warn him, if he had not, that by the laws of Egypt the crime he was attempting to commit was punishable with imprisonment or the bastinado. Then he desisted and went away.
–From Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (1869).
Pogo says
@If Twain could see it now
…another Sunshine State…
“…The Egyptian government’s ability to finance the project has been put into question. Although president Abdel Fattah El-Sisi stated that “the state won’t pay a penny” for the new capital, funds from the public coffers continue to flow into building the capital, adding to that the loans the government has acquired to fund the project, which has significantly increased the national debt of the nation.[95][96] “The president is borrowing money from abroad to build a massive city for the rich, but poor and middle-class Egyptians are paying the price tag for the megaprojects through taxes, lower investment in social services and subsidy cuts, even if the economic rationale for the developments is questionable.” said Maged Mandour, an Egyptian political analyst…”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Administrative_Capital
Also
https://www.google.com/search?q=al-ʿĀṣima al-ʾIdārīya al-Jadīda
Pogo says
@Correction
Also
https://www.google.com/search?q=al-%CA%BF%C4%80%E1%B9%A3ima+al-%CA%BEId%C4%81r%C4%ABya+al-Jad%C4%ABda
Pogo says
@Vance will be a lovely queen
Welcome to bottomless depths, Shahid — eternity is a long time.