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Weather: Partly sunny in the morning, then becoming mostly cloudy. A chance of thunderstorms. A chance of showers in the morning, then showers in the afternoon. Highs around 90. Temperature falling into the mid 80s in the afternoon. North winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90 percent.
Sunday Night: Mostly cloudy with a chance of showers and thunderstorms. Lows in the mid 70s. East winds 5 to 10 mph, becoming north after midnight. 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:
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from noon to 3 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.
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village: The city’s only farmers’ market is open every Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. at European Village, 101 Palm Harbor Pkwy, Palm Coast. With fruit, veggies, other goodies and live music. For Vendor Information email [email protected]
Al-Anon Family Groups: Help and hope for families and friends of alcoholics. Meetings are every Sunday at Silver Dollar II Club, Suite 707, 2729 E Moody Blvd., Bunnell, and on zoom. More local meetings available and online too. Call 904-315-0233 or see the list of Flagler, Volusia, Putnam and St. Johns County meetings here.
 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. |
Byblos: In his prologue to A Turn in the South, his 1989 travelog through the Deep South, V.S. Naipaul claims to have gone to Bowen, N.C., near Greensboro, home of a Black man called Howard who said if he were to lose his job and have none other in New York–he is the assistant to a lettering artist–he would go “home to my mama.” Except that there is no such thing as a place called Bowen, N.C. (Help me out if you know of one, I’ll be happy to correct.) Naipaul never says it’s in North Carolina, but he says they landed in Greensboro. No such thing as Peters, either–the town where he got a motel. Nor in South Carolina, for that matter. Not in Google maps, not in Google results, not in an old Rand McNally atlas (one of mine dates back to 1998). Did the editors at Knopf and The New Yorker not fact-check these places? Once “there,” if there is a there, Howard’s mother Hatty tells Naipaul: “I hope you’re not going to give us the gloom.” She’s referring to the past, maybe slavery, maybe not. He doesn’t ask her what she means. Naipaul is treated to an Easter service. He feels part of the community. All along there is “the unmentionable past,” though he should say: unmentioned by him, because unasked. People want to live in the present, a present as riven by the past as Hetty describing the countryside: “All this side white people, all that side black people. Black people, black people, white people, black people. Black people, white people.” The town, if it exists, is segregated. But people seem to get along. Naipaul ends the brief prologue with something about “the past living on,” but the past as Naipaul writes is hazy, and it’s wrapped up in “the dullness of small-town life,” just as the prologue is wrapped up in Naipaul’s perception of Howard. Howard describes himself as different, someone who “could hold himself separate both from the past and from the rage of Harlem.” What? Naipaul drops that rage of Harlem the way he so often described the Muslims or Iran or Pakistan as “hysterics” in Among the Believers, or when he referred to political Islam in that book as “rage, anarchy,” never explaining what he meant, just assuming we would know. We do not. You don’t get much from this prologue–either by way of intention or insights. It may have all been a fabrication. But so is so much of what Naipaul relates.Â
—P.T.
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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.
It happens, you know. You find you are old, and you just stop worrying about certain things. It is for young people to worry. I am fifty-nine. At that age life is just death in installments.
–From V.S. Naipaul, Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey (1981).
Laurel says
Ah, what to do with all those “Fuck Biden” flags! Too precious!