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Weather: Tropical storm conditions possible. Showers likely with a chance of thunderstorms in the morning, then showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Some thunderstorms may produce heavy rainfall in the morning. Highs in the upper 80s. South winds 15 to 20 mph with gusts up to 35 mph. Chance of rain 90 percent. Monday Night: Showers and thunderstorms. Lows in the mid 70s. South winds 15 to 20 mph with gusts up to 35 mph. Chance of rain 90 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 Flagler County Commission meets at 9 a.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. Meetings stream live on the Flagler County YouTube page.
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.
This event has been postponed due to weather. Nexus Center/South Library Groundbreaking is scheduled for 1 p.m. on the acreage opposite the Sheriff’s Operations Center on Commerce Parkway in Bunnell. The “Nexus Center” will be a multi-purpose facility to house a new library and the county’s Health and Human Services Department. See: “Flagler County Library’s $14 Million South Branch ‘Nexus Center’ Breaks Ground in August, Ending 10-Year Wait.”
The Flagler County Commission meets in workshop at 2 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. The commission will discuss the county’s capital budget at the workshop.
The Beverly Beach Town Commission meets at 6 p.m. at the meeting hall building behind the Town Hall, 2735 North Oceanshore Boulevard (State Road A1A) in Beverly Beach. See meeting announcements 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.
 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: How about this delightful description of a small bout of writer’s block, from Malamud’s The Tenants: “Lesser had given up writing and gone to read in the toilet. After the noise had departed he once more urged forth the pen, but it no longer flowed though he filled it twice. He willed but could not effect. The locomotive, coated with ice, stood like a petrified mastodon on the steel-frozen tracks. The steamboat had sprung a leak and slowly sank until clamped on all sides by the Mississippi thickened into green ice full of dead catfish staring in various directions.” Writing as a locomotive (a metaphor Zola would have appreciated), as a steamboat on the Mississippi (ditto Twain). Imagine the pleasure, the miracle, of coming up with these images, the way Aaron Copland wrote “Rodeo” (or was it “Appalachian Spring”?) in his Brooklyn flat without having ever seen either the West or West Virginia. The mystery of creation: it’s what we mean when we say god works in mysterious ways, if god is our strange recombination of trillions of atoms and synapses somehow making beauty of dark matter. It is enough to read a line line Malamud’s here and there to fuel up against the dak matter of everyday life in these extremist times.
—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.
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Flagler County Canvassing Board Meeting
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library
Flagler Tiger Bay Club Guest Speaker: Carlos M. Cruz
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
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.
Lesser had held out, thirty-six, unmarried yet, a professional writer. The idea is to stay a writer. At twenty-four and twenty-seven I published my first and second novels, the first good, the next bad, the good a critical success that couldn’t outsell its small advance, the bad by good fortune bought by the movies and kept me modestly at work enough to live on. Not very much is enough if you’ve got your mind on finishing a book. My deepest desire is to make my third my best. I want to be thought of as a going concern, not a freak who had published a good first novel and shot his wad. He fished an envelope out of the slot of his mailbox with both pinkies. If he didn’t some curious passer-by would. Lesser knew the handwriting, therefore source and contents: Irving Levenspiel, BBA, CCNY, class of 41, an unfortunate man in form and substance. One supplicatory sentence on thin paper: “Lesser, take a minute to consider reality and so please have mercy.” With a nervous laugh the writer tore up the let-ter. Those he kept were from the rare women who appeared in his life, spring flowers gone in summer; and those from his literary agent, a gray haired gent who almost never wrote any more. What was there to write about? Nine and a half years on one book is long enough to be forgotten. Once in a while a quasi-humorous inquiry, beginning: “Are you there?”, the last three years ago. I don’t know where’s there but here I am writing.
–From Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants (.
Brynn Gail Newton says
Steamboat, locomotive . . .
Transportation images often make for good reading.
Ian McEwan in “Saturday”:
Perowne dictated monotonously, and long after his secretary went home he typed in his overheated box of an office on the hospital’s third floor. What dragged him back was an unfamiliar lack of fluency. He prides himself on speed and a sleek, wry style. It never needs much forethought — typing and composing are one. Now he was stumbling. And though the professional jargon didn’t desert him — it’s second nature — his prose accumulated awkwardly. Individual words brought to mind unwieldy objects — bicycles, deckchairs, coat hangers — strewn across his path. He composed a sentence in his head, then lost it on the page, or typed himself into a grammatical cul-de-sac and had to sweat his way out. . . .
Not to mention Yann Martel’s preference of atheists over agnostics:
“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”
Ray W. says
Out of curiosity, I went to Wikipedia to see if they had an entry for “jobs created by president.”
I was surprised to see that the site went one step further. Using BLS jobs reports dating from the Truman administrations through January of 2020, the site had jobs added during the 429 months that Democrats held the presidency, the jobs added reports reflected an average of 164,000 jobs added each month. For the 475 months that Republicans held the office, the average was 61,000 jobs per month.
Just think, some FlaglerLive commenters are hell-bent on claiming Democrats have destroyed America.
Since I commonly focus on economic issues starting with the Reagan presidency, because his first administration was the one that emerged from what economists call the 15-year period of stagflation from about 1968 to 1983, let’s look at job performance by president over that term.
Reagan: 16.322 million jobs added over 96 months, or 170k jobs per month.
George H.W. Bush: 2.617 million jobs added over 48 months, or 55k jobs per month.
Clinton: 22.745 million jobs added over 96 months, or 237k jobs added per month.
George W. Bush: 523 thousand jobs added over 96 months, or 96k jobs added per month.
Obama: 11.570 million jobs added over 96 months, or 121k jobs added per month.
Trump: 2.670 million jobs lost over 96 months, or -56k jobs lost per month.
To be fair, the pandemic affected only former President Trump.
Because jobs data is collected each month during the week containing the 12th day, the data begins on February 1st for each president, not on the date of their respective inaugurations.
The site points out that since the fiscal year begins on October 1st, each incoming president inherits the previous president’s fiscal policies for the first eight months of their administration. For example, Obama’s fiscal policies that perhaps aided in a strong jobs market through the last six plus years of his administration carried over into the first eight months of the Trump presidency.
Finally, the site pointed out that since the Constitution gives the power to tax and spend only to Congress, the actual weight of each president’s policies on jobs added should be considered in that light. In that light it was Congress that passed the legislation that authorized the spending of $2.9 trillion in 2020. Yes, then-President Trump signed the unfunded spending mandates into law, but Congress mandated that it be spent. The next Congress passed another $3 trillion in an unfunded spending mandates. Biden signed those into law, too.
Make of it as you will.