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Weather: Partly sunny with a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the morning, then mostly cloudy with showers and thunderstorms likely in the afternoon. Highs in the upper 80s. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent. Thursday Night: Mostly cloudy. Showers and thunderstorms likely, mainly in the evening. Lows in the lower 70s. East winds around 5 mph. Chance of rain 60 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:
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.
The Palm Coast Beautification and Environmental Advisory Committee meets at 5 p.m. at City Hall, 160 Lake Avenue, Palm Coast.
The Flagler Beach City Commission meets at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall, 105 South 2nd Street in Flagler Beach. Watch the meeting at the city’s YouTube channel here. Access meeting agenda and materials here. See a list of commission members and their email addresses here.
Flagler Tiger Bay Club’s sixth annual Wine Tasting Meet & Greet at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE, begins with check-in at 5:30 p.m. and runs to 8:30 p.m. Help us celebrate our 6th Anniversary! Enjoy an evening of live entertainment, wine tasting, engaging conversations, and savory heavy hors d’oeuvres. Join more than 100 community leaders, club members, and guests as we toast our year of notable regional and national speakers, and unveil the next season’s lineup during the evening’s ‘Big Reveal’. Sample premium, world-class wines presented by La Piazza Cafe and international hors d’oeuvres by World Plate. Tickets: $40/Members
Future Members may apply their ticket toward their membership if initiated during the 5th Annual Wine Tasting Meet & Greet. Register today at www.FlaglerTigerBayClub.com.
In Coming Days: Aug. 22: Flagler Tiger Bay Club's sixth annual Wine Tasting Meet & Greet at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE, begins with check-in at 5:30 p.m. and runs to 8:30 p.m. Help us celebrate our 6th Anniversary! Enjoy an evening of live entertainment, wine tasting, engaging conversations, and savory heavy hors d’oeuvres. Join more than 100 community leaders, club members, and guests as we toast our year of notable regional and national speakers, and unveil the next season’s lineup during the evening’s ‘Big Reveal’. Sample premium, world-class wines presented by La Piazza Cafe and international hors d’oeuvres by World Plate. Tickets: $40/Members Future Members may apply their ticket toward their membership if initiated during the 5th Annual Wine Tasting Meet & Greet. Register today at www.FlaglerTigerBayClub.com. |
Musically: Do we ever tire of Scheherazade in any form–in her Arabian Nights, in Rimsky-Korsakov’s endlessly colorful creation (or Ravel’s lesser known version)? Netflix tells me there’s a French series called “Shéhérazade” from 2019: “Fresh out of juvenile detention in Marseille, 17-year-old Zach falls for a young prostitute and soon faces a dire dilemma while working as a pimp.” Not the Scheherazade I remember from my harem days of the imagination. As I recall she was the harem girls for some monarch who took his revenge on his unfaithful wife by bedding a different virgin every night and beheading her by dawn. You can never understand the cruelty of nymphomaniac monarchs, and certainly not just in the Mideast (“The dark, unrelenting Tiberius, the furious Caligula, the feeble Claudius, the profligate and cruel Nero, the beastly Vitellius, 50 and the timid, inhuman Domitian,” Gibbon wrote, were all in his judgment “condemned to everlasting infamy”). Anyway, in came Scheherazade. She was not interested in attending her beheading. She beguiled the monarch with a tale that invented the life-saving cliffhanger. He decided to kill her when she was finished the following night. But one tale led to another, one cliff hanging to another, and by the end of her thousand and one night of course, the monarch had fallen in love and married Scheherazade instead of beheading her.
—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
Palm Coast Beautification and Environmental Advisory Committee
Flagler Beach City Commission Meeting
6th Annual Flagler Tiger Bay Club Wine Tasting Meet & Greet
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Scenic A1A Pride Meeting
Flagler County Canvassing Board Meeting
Blue 24 Forum
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
For the full calendar, go here.
With the book souk still on my mind, I took a trip to see the riverside statue of Scheherazade, the storyteller of the 1,001 Arabian nights. Only in Baghdad, said friends who know the Arab world, would there be such a statue at all — not only of a woman but of a woman renowned for decidedly un-Islamic reasons. Scheherazade stood 20 feet high in black stone, hands extended, weaving her spell to an equally immense sculpture of her husband, the Sultan Shahryar, reclining entranced at a safe distance. Her eyes were large, her gown flowing, her expression modest; but there was no doubt that she dominated the scene, a woman harnessing the power of fiction to her own salvation.
–From “Remaindering Baghdad,” by Shahi Tharoor, New York Times Book Review, March 29, 1998.
Ray W. says
Thank you, Mr. Tristam, for highlighting via the ancient example of Scheherazade the power of storytelling, the art of persuasion, and the hope of the helpless in their moments of great despair.
Ray W. says
Speaking of storytelling and desperation, the HuffPost UK reports that in mid-February 2022 Vice-President Harris attended the Munich Security Conference, at which she met with US allies and Ukrainian President Zelenskyy. She did not meet with Russian President Putin. The publication also wrote that a Kremlin spokesperson confirmed that Putin and Harris had yet to meet: “Frankly speaking, I cannot recall a single contact between President Putin and Mrs Harris.”
Why is this of any significance? Yesterday, while speaking at a North Carolina rally, former President Trump uttered a string of falsehoods:
“Remember when Biden sent Kamala to Europe to stop the war in Ukraine?
“She met with Putin, and then three days later, he attacked. How did she do? Do you think she did a great job. She met with Putin to tell him, ‘Don’t do it.’
“And three days later, he attacked; that’s when the attack started. Do you know that, General?” (He was speaking to rally attendee retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Keith Kellog.
Laurel says
Trump is outdoing himself with lying. It has worked for him so far, and to a disappointingly large extent, still works. This Trump cultism is actually a study in real time. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is defined as a mental issue by Mayo Clinic.
Pogo says
@Elsewhere
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.”
― Omar Khayyám
https://www.google.com/search?q=Omar+Khayyám
Ray W. says
Yes, Pogo, I regret my error in a recent FlaglerLive comment about Dodge’s new Ramcharger truck series that adapts much older locomotive technology. The combined output of the two electric drive motors is 690 HP, not “over 300.” I was wrong. I apologize.
Additional reading reveals that Nissan has developed a three-cylinder engine specifically to generate electricity at its most efficient running speed for its car line. The engine does not have a variable throttle; it either idles or runs at 2500 rpm. Lacking a transmission, the engine remains off during battery drive mode and does not start to generate electricity until battery capacity drops to a set level. A “series” hybrid vehicle drives the wheels either by battery or by engine, but never at the same time. These are not “series” cars. The electric motor drives the wheels all the time.
Ray W. says
The Motley Fool reports that ExxonMobil and Chevron are in arbitration over oil rights in a field off the coast of Guyana.
In October of last year, Chevron started the process of purchasing the assets and assuming the debts of Hess for $60 billion. Less than two weeks earlier, ExxonMobil had started the process of purchasing the assets and assuming the debt of Pioneer Natural Resources for $59.5 billion.
The prize of the Hess deal with Chevron is the large Stabroek oil field off the coast of Guyana. Last year, a three-company collaboration earned $6.3 billion from the field, with anticipation of production tripling to 1.3 million barrels per day by 2027.
The problem? Exxon already owns 45% of the field. Hess owns 30%. A Chinese company owns 25%. Exxon argues that Chevron buying Hess’s share of the field triggers a buyout clause in the three-corporation collaborative agreement, allowing Exxon to preempt that portion of Chevron’s purchase; it can make its own offer by contractual right for all of Hess’s rights in the field.
Why is this of any import? I submit to all FlaglerLive readers the idea that companies are bidding billions, in this case a combined $119.5 billion, to purchase the assets and debts of two smaller oil-producers. Other large producers are buying up assets and debts of other smaller companies. The oil industry in America appears to be consolidating. Why? Does effective competition dwindle with each purchase?
I have long argued that the giant in the room, OPEC+, has been manipulating the international oil marketplace since February 2021, and that the manipulation continues today, to the detriment of every person at the gas pump. More recently, I stumbled across a developing storyline from an article in the Wall Street Journal that American energy companies have allegedly allied with OPEC+ to add their own weight to the international manipulation of the American consumer for corporate profit.
Have American energy producers developed a legally defensible method to continue to manipulate crude oil prices, if only they can keep their mouths shut? CEO after CEO is on record as telling shareholders that they intend to limit additional drilling in order to enhance shareholder profits. One went so far as saying that he would not change his company’s plan to increase production that year by no more than 5%, even if prices were to hit $200 per barrel. Yes, we are extracting more oil than ever before, yet international crude oil prices continue to hover around $80 per barrel. We continue to pay more than $3 per gallon. OPEC+ continues to limit its output. American oil industry heavyweights absorbing smaller companies means less competition in the American energy industry, means fewer smaller companies that could significantly boost their own production in the pursuit of profits caused by OPEC+ production cuts.
Make of this what you will. Me? Some of the gullible among us repeatedly comment on FlaglerLive that presidents control oil companies. To them, any rise in gas prices, therefore, is a president’s fault.
Other of the many gullible FlaglerLive commenters hysterically claim that we will soon be a socialist or communist country should Democrats win in November. Maybe they are right. After all, if our government were ever to nationalize the energy industry, an undeniably socialist act, then the new government master could order that we “Drill, Baby, Drill!” with abandon. The resulting increase in the outflow of American oil might drive energy prices down, thereby reducing oil company profits, which would be very popular with voters. Leaving the choice of when and where to drill to private industry doesn’t seem to work for the everyday Flagler energy consumer when certain American oil company executives decide to manipulate the international energy marketplace for corporate gain.