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Weather: Mostly sunny. Patchy fog in the morning. A chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the upper 80s. North winds around 5 mph. Chance of rain 40 percent. Tuesday Night: Partly cloudy with a chance of showers and thunderstorms in the evening, then mostly clear after midnight. Lows in the lower 70s. East winds around 5 mph, becoming south after midnight. Chance of rain 40 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 Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
The Palm Coast City Council meets at 9 a.m. at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For meeting agendas, audio and video, go here.
Local Mitigation Strategy Meeting, 10:30 a.m. at the Emergency Operations Center, 1769 E Moody Blvd Building 3, Bunnell, Training Room A. The Emergency Management staff is holding its multi-jurisdictional quarterly Local Mitigation Strategy public meeting to discuss grant funding, ongoing project progress and updates to Community Rating System program implementation efforts. Anybody interested in attending the meeting or wishing to learn more about mitigation is encouraged to attend. For meeting details/invite, please contact the County’s Emergency Management Office via e-mail or phone: [email protected] or 386-313-4200.
Palm Coast City Council Interviews of Candidates for Heighter Replacement, 1 p.m. at City Hall. The council will interview each of the applicants for appointment to the council seat Cathy Heighter resigned in August. The candidates will be interviewed individually, but in public, before the entire council. The council is expected to vote on the appointment on Oct. 1. See: “Palm Coast Council Will Appoint Heighter Replacement on Oct. 1, with Sept. 11 Deadline for Applicants.”
Celebrate Constitution Day With County Judge Andrea Totten, 1 p.m. at the Flagler County Public Library, 2500 Palm Coast Pkwy NW, Palm Coast. The special Constitution Day program features the Honorable Andrea K. Totten in the Doug Cisney Room. The event offers a unique opportunity to explore the significance of the United States Constitution and its impact on our lives today. Judge Totten will share her insights into the importance of upholding constitutional principles in our democracy. Engage in enlightening discussions, ask questions, and deepen your understanding of the Constitution’s role in shaping our nation’s history and future. Don’t miss this enlightening and educational event at the heart of our community’s civic engagement.
Flagler Beach City Commission Special Meeting on Veranda Bay Annexation: The City Commission meets in special session at 5:30 p.m. to consider its planning board’s recommendation regarding the proposed annexation of the Veranda Bay development along John Anderson Highway into the city.
Correction: an earlier version of this Briefing listed the 1 and 6 p.m. meetings of the Flagler County School Board as taking place today. They are taking place Wednesday, Sept. 18.
Hammock Community Association meeting, 6:30 p.m., Hammock Community Center, 79 Mala Compra Road, with guests Steven Flanagan of Palm Coast Utilities and Assistant County Administrator Jorge Salinas who’ll will give an update on sewer in the Hammock. Doors open at 6 p.m. All welcome.
The Flagler Beach Library Writers’ Club meets at 5 p.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach.
Food Truck Tuesdays is presented by the City of Palm Coast on the third Tuesday of every month from March to October. Held at Central Park in Town Center, visitors can enjoy gourmet food served out of trucks from 5 to 8 p.m.–mobile kitchens, canteens and catering trucks that offer up appetizers, main dishes, side dishes and desserts. Foods to be featured change monthly but have included lobster rolls, Portuguese cuisine, fish and chips, regional American, Latin food, ice cream, barbecue and much more. Many menus are kid-friendly. Proceeds from each Food Truck Tuesday event benefits a local charity.
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy, 8 p.m. at Cinematique Theater, 242 South Beach Street, Daytona Beach. General admission is $8.50. Every Tuesday and on the first Saturday of every month the Random Acts of Insanity Comedy Improv Troupe specializes in performing fast-paced improvised comedy.
 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. |
Readings: Is training for the Olympics, or simply to be a gymnast–a female gymnast: males have it easier–a form of child labor? Jean McNicol’s essay in the Aug. 15 London Review of Books (she’s the journal’s co-editor) would make you think so. I’d always (conveniently) thought that concentration-camp tactics for Olympic trainers was Chinese or Russian territory. Not so. Shoko Miyata, the 19-year-old captain of the Japanese women’s gymnastics team, was forced out of competition by her own federation a week before Paris for smoking and drinking, though her male counterparts do it all the time, no penalties, no questions asked. Mild, compared to the stories McNicol tells of the American camp when it was led by Béla and Márta Károlyi, the Romanian defectors to the United States who before then had trained Nadia Comăneci to her 1976 Olympic perfection in Montreal. They would go on to trail Mary Lou Retton and many others: “Regular training camps were held at the couple’s remote ranch in Texas, where parents weren’t allowed, absolute obedience was demanded, injuries were ignored and seen as a sign of mental weakness, bags were searched for contraband food and everyone was endlessly weighed. The team doctor, Larry Nassar, was popular because he gave out illicit sweets and sympathy. He also sexually abused almost all of the gymnasts, including the whole 2012 Olympic team and four out of five of the 2016 team.” Nassar is serving up to 170 years in prison actually not far from here: Wildwood, a bit northwest of Orlando. He was stabbed last year. He survived. Supposedly the Károlyi didn’t know what he was up to. But wasn’t what they did a form of child abuse? Isn’t the whole show of it a form of exploitation, especially in the United States, where girls’ ages were customarily flashed and their weight, until more recent restraint? There’s been some progress. McNicol ends: “You can be a gymnast and an adult. You can even have periods. But you can’t, it seems, have a cigarette or a drink. An act of solidarity makes one hope that the Japanese leadership might find it harder to impose such a ukase again. Its four remaining gymnasts, all teenagers, did a pose when they were being introduced before the team final. It was the one Shoko Miyata strikes at the end of her floor routine.”
—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
For the full calendar, go here.
One of the worst sins in Karolyi’s world is self-doubt. He coddles no one; he never gives the old “come on, you can do it” speech. As Erica took to the bars, Karolyi folded his arms and cocked his head to study her movements. She landed a little too tentatively for his taste. With a great Balkan shrug of his shoulders, Karolyi lifted his arms, then turned away. In the silence that followed, the other girls kept their faces down. It’s one thing to be yelled at by the coach; it’s another to be ignored altogether. Erica, they knew, was in trouble. Indeed, a week later, Erica—who had devoted five years of her life to Karolyi, whose parents had paid him around $350 a month in fees and spent thousands more in paying for her trips to meets around the world—was kicked out of the gym, told to pack her bags and leave. Karolyi said that she had become a distraction. She was holding back his top girls like Kim Zmeskal and Betty Okino. She was not working hard enough, he said, to become a world-class gymnast. When a weeping Erica left the camp with her mother, her career apparently at an end, the coach was not around to say good-bye. […] This is the Karolyi the public often does not see—a gloomy, glowering figure who hulks about his gym, lashing out at his students for the tiniest of imperfections. Bela Karolyi is the most disliked figure in competitive gymnastics. Other coaches claim that his golden touch is really a savage one, that for every successful gymnast he develops, he drives off half a dozen more. They see him as a tyrannical Svengali figure who calculatingly tries to wear down his top girls until only the two or three best ones are left standing. “Karolyi’s girls,” said one nationally respected coach, “don’t so much retire as expire.”
–From “I Have Made Their Lives Miserable,” a Skip Hollandsworth profile of Bela Karolyi, Texas Monthly, December 1991.
Ray W says
Lazard is an industry publication; it does not publish news articles.
Lazard recently released its 17th “Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis” for U.S. electricity production, based on a survey of current operating facilities.
The report differs in scope from the EIA study I refer to when I comment on the overall costs of energy production if one were to begin building a new plant, be it coal, wind, solar, etc., from scratch using the latest technology and operating the plant for 30 years.
According to Lazard, the range of costs (not average cost) of producing electricity via utility-grade solar farms in 2009 was between $323 per MwHr to $394 per MwHr. In 2024, the costs ranged from $29 per MwHr to $92 per MwHr.
For onshore wind farms, the range of costs of producing electricity in 2009 was between $109 per MwHr and $169 per MwHr. In 2024, the costs ranged from $27 per MwHr and $73 per MwHr.
For average costs across industries between 2009 and 2024:
Solar dropped from an average cost of $359 per MwHar in 2009 to $61 per MwHr in 2024.
Nuclear rose from an average cost of $123 per MwHr in 2009 to $182 per MwHr in 2024.
Coal slightly rose from an average cost of $111 per MwHr in 2009 to $118 per MwHr in 2024.
CCNG dropped slightly from an average cost of $83 per MwHr in 2009 to $76 per MwHr in 2024.
Onshore wind dropped from an average cost of $135 per MwHr in 2009 to $50 per MwHr in 2024.
Make of this what you will. Me? The EIA, using its own methodology to predict a future cost of producing electricity if one were to start building a generating plant in 2022 using the latest technology, comes up with average cost figures for a variety of energy sources, derived from data provided by generating plants located around the world.
Lazard, using its own methodology to discern a present cost of producing electricity using a variety of energy sources, based on existing technologies already implemented by American generating plants located around the country.
Each survey is accurate in its own way. Neither disproves the other, because each uses a unique methodology.
The EIA predicts that if one were to build, starting in 2022, a utility-scale solar farm, the overall costs during the life of the plant would average $22 per MwHr.
Lazard shows that today’s average cost to produce electricity from existing utility-grade solar farms is $61 per MwHr.
Apples and oranges. Both studies are right for different reasons.
The innumerate among us see an annual jobs report derived from data culled from unemployment insurance reports that shows 818k fewer jobs created when compared to monthly reports over the same period derived from over 20,000 employer surveys, and they howl fraud and intentional misrepresentation.
In reality, it is two different reports based on two different methodologies interpreting two different datasets. Each report is accurate for different reasons.
Does every FlaglerLive reader understand why James Madison warned us all against the dangers presented by the “pestilential” partisan members of faction to their proposed liberal democratic Constitutional republic?
Laurel says
Donald, you are such a crybaby! A really, really, nasty crybaby. What a spoiled little piece of …
Sherry says
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BrCvZmSnKA&ab_channel=TheKiffness
Here’s a song about eating the cats and dogs. . . my laugh of the day
Laurel says
“Sometimes I’m alone,
Sometimes I’m not,
Sometimes I’m alone,
Hello?”
“I’m Big Billy…”
I love the Kiffness!