The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, October 21, 2024

Kids hate fact-checking teachers, KID HATES FACT CHECKING TEACHER by Randall Enos, Easton, Conn.

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Weather: Mostly sunny with a 20 percent chance of showers. Highs in the lower 80s. Northeast winds 10 to 15 mph. Monday Night: Partly cloudy. A slight chance of showers in the evening. Lows in the upper 60s. 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 Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.

Today at a Glance:

The three-member East Flagler Mosquito Control District Board meets at 10 a.m. at District Headquarters, 210 Airport Executive Drive, Palm Coast. Agendas are available here. District staff, commissioners and email addresses are here. The meetings are open to the public.

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.

A Flagler County Commission Workshop is scheduled for 1 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. The commission will discuss its beach management plan, noise at the county airport, legislative priorities for the session that begins on March 4, and other issues that may arise.

The Flagler County Commission meets at 5 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 E. Moody Boulevard, Building 2, Bunnell. The commission will discuss the non-compliance report from the Bulow RV Park, where there have been issues of residents not complying with code enforcement rules and facing eviction as a consequence. 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. View archived meetings after January 1, 2017 here . View archived meetings before Jan. 9, 2017 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.

Byblos: Reading crime novels for the first time on the approach of 60–a noir experience of its own–is a form of language immersion like those programs they offer at Bennington College, where you can learn Arabic or Italian in a very short time. It’s a time-traveling cultural experience back to the years when being offensive, racist, sexist, gratuitously violent was the formula for better sales. Giving offense and gratuitous violence have survived, but the offense is generic now: lots of cussing in all sorts of permutations, but for god’s sake don’t offend the woke. James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice is considered a classic of the genre, if not a groundbreaking book, from 1934, though it’s really a kinder, gentler remake of Zola’s Therese Raquin, as awful (and impossible to put down) a book as Zola ever wrote: it’s the story of two young lovers who conspire to kill one of the two’s sickly, gluey husbands, bu can’t get past the psychological payback for their act. In Postman Cora and Frank Chambers conspire to kill Nick Papadakis, Cora’s husband, and manage to pull it off, but the consequences on them both are spiral of spites and spikes. There is the fabulous opening line: “They threw me off the hay truck about noon” and those two opening pages that grab you by the nape and rub you nose in filthy, guilty pleasures: “Then I saw her. She had been out back, in the kitchen, but she came in to gather up my dishes. Except for the shape, she really wasn’t any raving beauty, but she had a sulky look to her, and her lips stuck out in a way that made me want to mash them in for her.” I mean, come on! Then the racism: “I’m just as white as you are,” she tells him, protesting being mistaken for a “Mex” (in that scene written about here a couple of days ago, in connection with John McCain’s racism). She’s just as crude about her husband’s progeny: “I can’t have no greasy Greek child.” Or the “one thing about a Mexican. He’s slow but he’s honest.” Then the kind of sexism that would make Updike trill, as when Cora describes herself adoringly to Frank as “Just your dumb baby,” then tells him more earnestly, “Next time I try to act smart, will you hang one on my jaw?” and three times in the course of the novel–the under-the-mattress Portnoy of its day–begs him, “Bite me! Bite me!” (not in the modern derisive sense) or “Rip me! Rip me!” (he does) and in case you forgot, 40 pages later, “Rip me, Frank. Rip me like you did that night.” He rips: “She looked like the great-grandmother of every whore in the world. The devil got his money’s worth that night.” Apparently the first movie versions left out all the racism and the rips, American sensibilities being what they were not, but a later version–maybe the one with Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange–did not, though every movie version decided to make Cora a dumb blond, which, ironically, is the last thing she is, though the poet Joseph Brodsky’s description of a writer he once met in Venice may apply, in Cain style: “She was the kind that keeps married men’s dreams wet.” The postman, one is to suppose, is a vengeful Old Testament sort of god, ringing twice, biting and ripping and laughing.

—P.T.

Now this:

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