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Weather: A 50 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly after 1pm. Mostly sunny, with a high near 86. Heat index values as high as 100. Light and variable wind becoming south 5 to 8 mph in the morning. New rainfall amounts of less than a tenth of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms. Thursday Night: A 10 percent chance of showers before 2am. Partly cloudy, with a low around 79. South wind 6 to 9 mph.
- 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:
Drug Court convenes before Circuit Judge Terence Perkins at 10 a.m. in Courtroom 401 at the Flagler County courthouse, Kim C. Hammond Justice Center 1769 E Moody Blvd, Bldg 1, Bunnell. Drug Court is open to the public. See the Drug Court handbook here and the participation agreement here.
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library, 11 to 11:30 a.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach. It’s where the wild things are: Hop on for stories and songs with Miss Doris.
‘The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals’ at City Repertory Theatre, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday July 18, Friday July 19, Saturday July 20 and Monday July 22. A matinee performance will be at 3 p.m. Sunday July 21. In CRT’s black box theater at City Marketplace, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite B207, Palm Coast. Tickets are $30 adults and $15 students, available online at crtpalmcoast.com or by calling 386-585-9415. Tickets also will be available at the venue just before curtain time. See Rick de Yampert’s preview: “Alien Menace and Combustible Dancing Shake Up City Repertory Theatre with “The Guy Who Didn’t Like Musicals.”
 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: I never got a red-light traffic ticket in those days when Palm Coast had those awful cameras at some 40 locations, drawing the wrath of judges and clerks of court before finally seeing a better kind of light. But I got one in Chouzy sur Cisse along the Loire in the middle of France 11 years ago. Cleaning up and throwing away useless accumulations yielded that paperwork the other day: 68 euros, though if paid within 45 days they’d lower that to 45. I’d rented a car there. They had my number. They sent me the fine to my house in Palm Coast. I paid. What struck me was the pettiness of it: I was going 96 in a 90–km/hr, which is to say 60 in a 56. They do not have a law, as Florida does, that bars ticketing when the speed is below 5 mph. They probably nail you if it’s 1 kmh over. Surprisingly, the fine is still 68 euros for speeding between 1 and 19 kmh above the limit, jumping to 135 euros beyond that. But check this out: if you speed 50 kmh above the speed limit, it’s a 1,500 euro fine (the euro is almost equal to the dollar these days). So if you go 80 in a 40 (mph), it’s a $1,500 fine. No wonder Jean-Paul Belmondo stopped making films.
—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
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
It’s Back! Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
For the full calendar, go here.
Thus, Abby had come to belong to that group who have spent their lives leaning on someone or being leaned on by a father, a mother, a husband; and who, when the casket is closed or the divorce decree is final, find that they are waifs. They hide their humiliating condition–for they tend to look on loneliness as inadmissible and a little disgraceful, they tend to regard themselves as wallflowers by playing bridge on the breezy piazzas of seaside hotels, and writing multitudinous letters, and going to lectures on the excavations of mounds and ruins in Jericho, and applying themselves with assiduity and dismay to the language of the country in which, at the moment, they find themselves.
–From Jeanne Stafford, from “The Reluctant Gambler,” Saturday Evening Post, October 4, 1958. (The story was later retitled “The Children’s Game”).
Pogo says
@A word
As stated
https://www.google.com/search?q=facade
And a song
Ray W. says
Eternally beautiful music.
I recently came across an intriguing and provocative article in The New Yorker about a Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor.
The reporter argues that Taylor views art as “not an accessory to pleasure but the means of our connection to the cosmos.”
“Taylor is challenging the belief that science provides objective truth, and art mere feeling — that art provides sensations, and what you make of the sensations is all up to you. He insists that there is an intrinsic, grounded human value in the experience of art. At one point, he constructs things toward which our attitudes are subjective with things that have hard, biological significance: I may prefer vanilla ice cream to strawberry, but I must have air to breathe. Is listening to Beethoven, he asks, more like preferring ice cream or more like needing to breathe? Or does it, as Taylor is convinced, belong to the realm of ethical elevation? Perhaps hearing late Beethoven is more like seeing that viral video of a small Chinese boy cooking a meal of egg fried rice for his still smaller brother than it is like the experience of eating the egg fried rice. ‘Strong ethical insights are grounded in what I call ‘felt intuitions.” Taylor writes. ‘Someone couldn’t be said to have a moral conviction about universal human rights, for instance, if she wasn’t prone on the appropriate occasions to experience them, to feel them as inspiring (hearing the choral movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony), and their flagrant violation as appalling.’ We are convinced because we are moved. The reasoning may sound circular — I know its inspiring because it feels inspiring — but his point is that what great modern poetry does is to encircle us with inspiring feelings.
“Art isn’t absolute, but it isn’t at all arbitrary. Taylor escapes from the divide between subjectivity and objectivity through a concept he calls ‘interspace’ — not the inner space where I perceive and enjoy but some resonant atmosphere that exists between me and the world. The sound of the cello in a Schubert trio isn’t entirely in the cello, where the sound begins, or entirely between my listening ears, where the experience of structured sound as music happens, but somewhere between the two, where the creation of meaning takes place. The interspace is the phenomenal field of the arts. When we listen to sublime music, then, our experience is not of pleasure but of an overwhelming feeling of encountering and exploring some truth. The music sculps us, we sculpt the music, and to reduce this to mood misses the cosmic connection that the experience proposes and, quite often, provides.”
Pogo says
@Ray W.
Thanks for a thoughtful and uplifting comment.
There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.
— Albert Schweitzer
Ray W. says
More on Charles Taylor:
“Taylor extolls the communities of meaning that are drawn together by the interspace of enchantment. Yet, as he would be the first to acknowledge, such communities are, first of all, communities of practice. We learn to listen, just as we learn to read. Learning to love Beethoven’s music is first to love the sound, then to find it achingly long-winded, then to sustain concentration, then to find the concentration rewarded by new understanding — only to return to the pleasure of the sound.
“The interspace is an arena of shared education as much as a solitary epiphany. Ritual without reason has led modernity in many wrong directions. Practical communities are as valuable as poetic communities. The experiences Taylor evokes of being overwhelmed by aesthetic responses scarcely distinguishable from ethical elevation are ones we encounter daily — exploring a stranger’s playlist of Chuck Berry and his precursors, reading a newly sent poem, or seeing an Instagram Story of children in a distant land sharing a meal. The interspace is enchanted mainly in its normalcy. Perhaps connecting with the cosmos is not as hard as philosophers sometimes imagine. It’s where we live.”
Pogo says
@For hard working families like yours
Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club set to raise initiation fee to $1 million
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-mar-a-lago-initiation-fee-b2581590.html
Q: Panhandling for $1000: Worst panhandler of all time.
A: Who is Trump
Next, final jeopardy.
Pat Stote says
I had to look up the lyrics for that song.
You are right on the money
Thanks for your comment. I don’t always get what you are saying but I know you’re an intelligent person.
Pogo says
@Pat Stote
Thanks, likewise.
If enough people understood who rides in the wagon, and who pulls it, maybe things would improve; but I doubt it, most of us either spend our life pulling or being trampled, while the wagon’s riders roll along, with little purpose beside keeping their seat, and existing in the manner to which they are accustomed. One small example:
As stated
https://www.google.com/search?q=car+dealerships+make+more+money+on+financing+than+they+do+on+the+car
Apply that to the rest of life too — and so it goes. Be well, and take care.
Jim says
I guess it’s bad to speak ill of Trump since someone took a shot at him but…..
Trump lies about everything – EVERYTHING! For him to say he isn’t part of Project 2025 and doesn’t know about it or who is running it is just another lie out of his mouth. Surely even his sycophants realize he has a very loose relationship with the truth!
Trump will follow Project 2025 if elected because he personally stands for nothing other than lining his pockets with all the money he can grift. His followers will be placed in all the key positions and Project 2025 will be off and running. And while it’s happening, all the while, Trump will deny reality and say it’s not happening. Only when something occurs that his cult loves will he ever take credit.
I will never understand how anyone can be a Trump supporter – he has zero loyalty to his supporters and has said as much – “I don’t care about you, just your vote”. (Of course, that is explained away as a joke…).
If this Fascist gets elected again, all I can say is all those who voted for him need to get ready for the demolition of all the “freedoms” they think he provides. More taxes for the middle class; less for the rich. Abandoning Ukraine to Putin and getting out of NATO. Inflation at levels “never seen before”. We’ll be lucky to have any allies when we need them. But, hey, America first and everything else is just transactional. Just ask Melania – what was Trump doing while she was having their kid????