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Weather: Partly sunny with a slight chance of thunderstorms. A chance of showers in the morning, then showers likely in the afternoon. Highs in the mid 90s. South winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent. Friday Night: Mostly cloudy with a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms in the evening, then partly cloudy after midnight. Lows in the mid 70s. South winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 20 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. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM and 1550 AM.
Flagler and Florida Unemployment Numbers Released: The state’s Commerce Department released the previous month’s preliminary unemployment numbers for Florida and its 67 counties, at 10 a.m. See the data releases page here.
‘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.”
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.
 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. |
Diary: This then is my big day, when I can get a little more personal than I should, the day when the stars aligned so coincidentally, so terribly and so fortuitously. It is the anniversary of my dear father’s death in 1976, of my departure from Lebanon two years later on the same day, in sight and in fear of Syrian guns (a friend of my mother’s had hired a Muslim taxi driver who knew the ins and outs of Muslim West Beiru to ferry us out of East Beirut, through the other zone, and to the airport, in what was not just yet, but would soon become, Hezbollah country: my last hour or two in Beirut, before reaching the airport, was a ride of fear, after a childhood of wonders: see the Lebanon of my 1970s below). In 1979 on that day I landed at JFK Airport as a permanent American resident, Green Card in hand. (The country was still trying to figure out what went wrong at Three Mile Island and Jimmy Carter, getting nervous about the election, was firing half his cabinet). I can’t say that I was naturalized on July 19. That would happen on Dec. 13, 1986, right around the time when Iran-Contra was exploding around Ronald Reagan’s senilities. But there was to be one more coincidental date, this one a bit intentional: proposing to Cheryl on the deck of th Grand Hotel on Mackinac on that day in 2001, a few weeks before that terrible day that year that seemed to make the whirlwinds of Lebanon inescapable–the fanaticism, the terrorism, the blowbacks. Rome was on fire on that day, too–the day Nero was said to have looked on indifferently, playing his lyre, though there may be more myth than truth to it. Manhattan’s last great fire was on this day too, in 1845. This year, only Washington is burning. I have not regretted my citizenship. I still love this country more than, at times, I thought I could, though the heartbreaks, as with all loves, can be difficult, and their frequency, as with few loves, becoming unbearable.
—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.
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Scenic A1A Pride Meeting
Blue 24 Forum
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Flagler County’s Cold-Weather Shelter Opens
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
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.
It’s 11pm on a humid Thursday evening in East Beirut, and already it’s busier than Saturday night in central London. Phalanxes of girls parade down Rue Monot, cling-wrapped in Gucci and DKNY. Young men in designer suits leap out of open-topped sports cars, throwing their keys to the parking valet. Queues are already forming outside some of the area’s many bars, even though, in Beirut terms, the evening has barely begun. “Nothing stops Beirutis from going out,” enthuses Roody Jhalil, a 19-year-old student. “It’s only at night that the city really comes alive. People are determined to have fun, to forget about how f—ed up the economy is, what a mess the whole country is in. So people go out nearly every night.” […] Entrepreneurs are making the most of it. Against a backdrop of concrete high-rises, ancient sloping streets and grandiose red-tiled villas ornamented with bullet holes, a gaggle of bars, clubs and shops are sprouting up with astonishing speed. Unlike the bombed out husk of the old Holiday Inn next door, The Phoenicia Hotel, once centre of the high-life that saw the likes of Brigitte Bardot, Marlon Brando and the pre-exile Kim Philby partying in the Sixties, has dusted itself down and is now doing slick business in suitably decadent splendour. (Play out your Cannes fantasies walking up the immense red carpet to the lobby, where live-size nymphs recline nonchalantly.)
–From “Rock the kasbah,” by Toby Manning, The Independent, June 4, 2000.
Jim Brown says
Why not forget about fictional agents like Bond and Bourne dashing to save the world from disaster and forget about CIA and MI6 officers reclining on their couches dreaming up espionage scenarios to thrill you. Check out what a real MI6 and CIA secret agent does nowadays. Why not browse through TheBurlingtonFiles.org website and read about Bill Fairclough’s escapades when he was an active MI6 and CIA agent? The website is rather like an espionage museum without an admission fee … and no adverts. You will soon be immersed in a whole new world which you won’t want to exit.
After that experience you may not know who to trust so best read Beyond Enkription, the first novel in The Burlington Files series. It’s a noir fact based spy thriller that may shock you. What is interesting is that this book is apparently mandatory reading in some countries’ intelligence agencies’ induction programs. Why? Maybe because the book is not only realistic but has been heralded by those who should know as “being up there with My Silent War by Kim Philby and No Other Choice by George Blake”. It is an enthralling read as long as you don’t expect fictional agents like Ian Fleming’s incredible 007 to save the world or John le Carré’s couch potato yet illustrious Smiley to send you to sleep with his delicate diction, sophisticated syntax and placid plots!
See https://theburlingtonfiles.org/news_2023_06.07.php and https://theburlingtonfiles.org/news_2022.10.31.php.
Pogo says
@Otherwise, etc., …UV Safety Awareness Month
As stated
https://news.va.gov/133164/how-to-have-more-fun-in-the-sun-uv-safety-awareness-month/
Be well, take care.
Pogo says
@Otheerwise, etc.
As stated
Treasury warns that anti-woke banking laws like Florida’s are a national security risk
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/treasury-warns-that-anti-woke-banking-laws-like-florida-s-are-a-national-security-risk/ar-BB1qhnHS?OCID=ansmsnnews11
Meatball (and Trump fan girl) Ron rides again. Elon and the tech bros cowboys are tingling with anticipation: Thanks, for everything — suckers!
Ray W. says
Thank you, Mr. Tristam for sharing your reminiscences of different events coincidentally or not occurring on one date.
Reading of Mr. Tristam’s thoughts as, taxi-bound, he fled with his family the political and religious violences of the war-torn streets of Beirut, I can’t help but recall the many detractors who, over the years, have falsely accused him of so many things.
Who knows if they still exist, and if so at what level they exist, but I recall the several commenters years ago who insisted that Mr. Tristam be accompanied by deputies on his visits to Flagler’s courthouse, because he was, in their addled minds, a Muslim terrorist who presents a clear and present danger to the United States. Others fancied him a liberal bent on destroying America as they misperceive it. Still others relied on a rich fantasy life to see a journalist participating in a vast conspiracy to impose elite northeastern university values on us all.
Each of the many detractors find their own reasons to support their claims.
I don’t suppose any of them understand what it’s like to peer out of a window of their homes facing a stronghold of a Muslim extremist neighborhood that began at the end of the street. To a child of the 70s in Beirut, merely looking out the home window was inviting a sniper bullet. To a child of the 70s in Beirut meant hoping that whoever decided to enter the fray, be they Israeli or American, wouldn’t bring solely promises of help; that they might also spawn the actuality of more death. How does anyone understand the impetus to throw lesser Minute Rice at the new occupier, saving the Basmati for a future truly benevolent host that might never come?
Can anyone fully understand the mind of the Christian Phalangist, the mind of the Lebanese Arab Shia extremist, the mind of the dispossessed Palestinian extremist, all at one time?
To his many detractors, I say they don’t have a clue. I don’t either.
Mr. Tristam understands the world of the Israeli teenage girl who gets on a bus bearing fear that if the bus driver stops at a red light, some bomber might detonate an idling car-bomb next to the bus at any time. His detractors have no clue. I don’t either.
Mr. Tristam understands the world of the young Ukrainian mother who leaves her children at home with their grandparents on a Saturday morning so she can leave to shop at a neighborhood market for vegetables bearing fear that a Russian hypersonic missile might strike the market at any time. His detractors have no clue. I don’t either.
Mr. Tristam understands the world of the aging West Bank farmer who leaves each morning to tend to his groves, as his family has always done, bearing fear that a religious extremist Jewish settler might randomly shoot him at any time. His detractors have no clue. I don’t either.
Mr. Tristam understands the world of the young Sarajevan Muslim bride who paraded in her bridal gown down a street during the Serbian War bearing fear of the people she once called her neighbors; she was shot alongside a number of other celebrants by a Christian Orthodox sniper. His detractors have no clue. I don’t either.
Mr. Tristam understands the world of the Yerevani Armenian Christian who lives in a valley bearing fear of slowly falling under the guns of the Nagorno-Karabakhi Muslims as they take hill after hill overlooking the Armenian capital (most of them recently fled Yerevan after Putin gave their city to the forces of Nagorno-Karabakh). His detractors have no clue. I don’t either.
The closest thing I have to understanding the world of Mr. Tristam’s childhood comes from learning after the fact that I and all my family members had been the target of Klan extremists who had agreed to hire an assassin to kill my father and me and the rest of my family because my father had prosecuted Klan members who had blocked a bridge just north of old St. Augustine late one summer night; they exited their vehicles bearing clubs and chains and beat a number of their fellow citizens for fishing while black. The normal Southern prosecutorial practice of that era was to submit the case to a grand jury, which juries routinely returned a “No True Bill.” My father bypassed the grand jury and directly filed felony charges against the Klansmen. For that, I needed to die. I was seven at the time.
At first, the whole family moved to a motel on the beachside shore of the river in St. Augustine. Suddenly, one day, all six Warren children were loaded into the family car. My mother and father drove us through the night to Greensboro. We unloaded at my paternal grandmother’s house and Mom and Dad turned around and drove straight back to St. Augustine. I learned later that an undercover LEO had infiltrated the Klan; he had reported back on the assassination plans. When we returned from North Carolina, we had 24-hour police protection at our home for about two weeks. One officer in a cruiser on the beach in front of my home. A second officer in a cruiser parked in our driveway. A third officer on our third-floor sundeck carrying a shotgun. My memory was to carry iced tea to the officers asking if they would like a drink.
All religious extremists, all nationalists, all racists are a plague upon us all. They are a triumvirate of disease. They are pestilential.
When children need to die because their father prosecutes Klansmen for attacking fellow citizens who are fishing while Black, there is something terribly wrong with the politics of the country. Is there a difference between fantasizing of crushing vermin and beating Black fishermen? Between fantasizing of beheading Democrats and beating Black fishermen? Between fantasizing of slitting throats of civil servants and beating Black fishermen?