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Weather: Patchy fog in the morning. Sunny. Highs in the lower 80s. Northeast winds around 5 mph. Saturday Night: Partly cloudy. Lows in the lower 60s. East winds around 5 mph in the evening, becoming light and variable.
- 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:
General Election Early Voting is available today in Bunnell, Palm Coast and Flagler Beach from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at five locations. Any registered and qualified voter who is eligible to vote in a county-wide election may vote in person at any of the early voting site, regardless of assigned precinct. According to Florida law, every voter must present a Florida driver’s license, a Florida identification card or another form of acceptable picture and signature identification in order to vote. If you do not present the required identification or if your eligibility cannot be determined, you will only be permitted to vote a provisional ballot. Don’t forget your ID. A couple of secure drop boxes that Ron DeSantis and the GOP legislature haven’t yet banned (also known as Secure Ballot Intake Stations) are available at the entrance of the Elections Office and at any early voting site during voting hours. The locations are as follows:
- Flagler County Elections Supervisor’s Office, Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell.
- Flagler County Public Library, 2500 Palm Coast Pkwy NW, Palm Coast.
- Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE.
- Palm Coast’s Southern Recreation Center, 1290 Belle Terre Parkway.
- Flagler Beach United Methodist Church, 1520 South Daytona Avenue, Flagler Beach.
See a sample ballot here. See the Live Interviews with all local candidates below.
Palm Coast Mayor Cornelia Manfre Mike Norris Palm Coast City Council Ty Miller, Dist. 1 Jeffrey Seib, Dist. 1 Ray Stevens, Dist. 3 Andrew Werner, Dist. 3 Backgrounders Manfre’s and Norris’s Final Clash Temper and Temperament at Tiger Bay Forum Stevens and Werner Sharpen Differences |
Coffee With Commissioner Scott Spradley: Flagler Beach Commission Chairman Scott Spradley hosts his weekly informal town hall with coffee and doughnuts at 9 a.m. at his law office at 301 South Central Avenue, Flagler Beach. All subjects, all interested residents or non-residents welcome. The gatherings usually feature a special guest.
Peps Art Walk, noon to 5 p.m. next to JT’s Seafood Shack, 5224 Oceanshore Blvd, Palm Coast. Step into the magical vibes of Unique Handcrafted vendors gathering in one location, selling handmade goods. Makers, crafters, artists, of all kinds found here. From honey to baked goods, wooden surfboards, to painted surfboards, silverware jewelry to clothing, birdbaths to inked glass, beachy furniture to foot fashions, candles to soaps, air fresheners to home decor and SO much more! Peps Art Walk happens on the last Saturday of every month. A grassroots market that began in May of 2022 has grown steadily into an event with over 30 vendors and many loyal patrons. The event is free, food and drink on site, parking is free, and a raffle is held to raise money for local charity Whispering Meadows Ranch. Kid friendly, dog friendly, great music and good vibes. Come out to support our hometown artist community!
The Saturday Flagler Beach Farmers Market is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at Wickline Park, 315 South 7th Street, featuring prepared food, fruit, vegetables , handmade products and local arts from more than 30 local merchants. The market is hosted by Flagler Strong, a non-profit.
Palm Coast’s 25th Anniversary Celebration: The City of Palm Coast hosts its 25th Anniversary Celebration from 4 to 8 p.m. at Central Park in Town Center. Come out to honor the community’s vibrant history with a day of live entertainment, great food, and family-friendly activities. Since incorporating in 1999, Palm Coast has thrived as one of Florida’s most dynamic cities. Tomorrow’s event is a unique opportunity for everyone—whether you’re a longtime resident or new to the area—to celebrate all we’ve accomplished together.
Palm Coast 25th Anniversary Celebration Highlights:
- Anniversary Ceremony: Join us at 4 p.m. for a ceremony featuring a proclamation, a living time capsule, an awards presentation, and cake!
- Live Entertainment: Enjoy music from Beach City Live, a Jacksonville band covering hits from the 60s to today, plus a DJ.
- Food Trucks & Beer Gardens: Local food trucks will serve a variety of delicious options, and two beer gardens will be sponsored by the Flagler County Cultural Council.
- Family Activities: Kids can enjoy a rock-climbing wall, bounce houses, face painting, a trackless train, and more! Access to the kids’ zone is $10 per child, with proceeds benefiting the Palm Coast Historical Society & Museum.
- City & History Exhibits: Learn about Palm Coast’s city services and discover our city’s story through exhibits from the Palm Coast Historical Society.
Admission is free! Don’t miss this chance to celebrate our shared past and the bright future of Palm Coast!
Maze Days at Cowart Ranch, Fridays from 5 to 10 p.m., Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., Sundays from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., Cowart Ranch and Farms, 8185 West Highway 100, Bunnell. $15 per person, children 2 and under free. Get lost on a 5 acre walk through maze (approximately 30-60 minute adventure). Pick the perfect carver or edible pumpkin at our Pumpkin Patch with lots of sunflowers and of picture opportunities! Some pumpkins grown right here on the farm. Try to spot the cattle herd on the Tractor driven Hayrides (approximately 15 minutes). Get up close and friendly with farm animals. (Chickens, goats, calves, pigs and more!) Pony Rides! (Not included with entry- $8 or 2 for $15 & legal guardian must sign waiver). Challenge your friends and family at our hand pumped water driven Ducky Dash game. Roll and Race down our NEW Rat Race game that’s a Ratatoullie blast. And plenty more.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from 10 a.m. to 1 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.
 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: The front page of The Times on this day in 1922 carried a top-of-the-fold headline: ENRAGED ELEPHANT HITS WOMAN AT ZOO. The story is itself enraging: “Angered because, when he held out his trunk for peanuts, small boys gave him pebbles, the big African elephant Khartoum flew into a rage at 3:80 yesterday afternoon, broke a bar of iron from the fence of his corral at the Bronx Zoo, and tossed the piece of metal into the air, seriously hurting a young woman as she swung her two children out of the way. Khartoum had been sulky because he feels neglected while his mate Alice, parading around the grounds of the Zoo with a big hamper full of children on her back, is petted, scratched, fed and fussed over. It is against zoo regulations to feed the animals peanuts. This law is violated as far as Alice is concerned, but enforced strictly by the public against Khartoum. According to the keepers, this is Khartoum’s own fault, because he is full of rages, furies, wraths, cholers, moods, displeasures and indignations.”
—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
For the full calendar, go here.
This is not simply a wildfire phenomenon; each climate threat promises to trigger similarly brutal cycles. The fires should be terrorizing enough, but it is the cascading chaos that reveals the true cruelty of climate change—it can upend and turn violently against us everything we have ever thought to be stable. Homes become weapons, roads become death traps, air becomes poison. And the idyllic mountain vistas around which generations of entrepreneurs and speculators have assembled entire resort communities become, themselves, indiscriminate killers—and are made, with each successive destabilizing event, only more likely to kill again.
–From David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth (2019).
Pogo says
@A toast to uninhabitating
Sing along
Ray W, says
Hello Pogo.
A high school class assignment comes to mind. The 30 or so students were broken up into groups. Each group was told to collaborate on designing a utopian society. As I recall, this really caught our imaginations. My group animatedly argued over what would be utopian to the mind of a teenager in the early 70’s.
I could hear snippets of conversation from each of the other groups. I suppose they could hear us, too. Near the end of the hour, each utopian version of society was presented to the class. Perhaps not unsurprisingly, each group came up with a similar idea of utopia.
What was the idea? An island distant from foreign shores with coastlines dominated by easily defensible rugged terrain and one major port for ingress and egress, plus an airport. There were variations on the theme of isolation, but not much.
Looking back, I don’t recall hearing any group presenting ideas about a university system designed to foster young minds, or a health care system designed to minimize illness, pain or suffering, or a thriving agricultural system to provide for caloric wants and needs. Community must have been assumed. No one in my hearing talked about imports and exports. The main thing we seemed to focus on was defending our version of utopia from violent outsiders.
As I type this, I think of Oahu and the other Hawaiian Islands. Long advertised as a tourist utopia, it has little heavy industry other than tourism and agriculture suited to the climate and soils.
Curious about immigration status, I browsed a couple of sites. It seems that nearly 20% of Hawaiian residents are foreign-born, primarily from the Philippines. About a third of the health care community is immigrant. Some 40% of farmers, fishers, and foresters come from outside the U.S. Immigrants own over a quarter of Hawaiian businesses.
Laurel says
Let me see, I’ll go back to my late teens, early twenties. I see a a garden of Eden, where women can eat fruit, gaining knowledge, without being condemned for eternity. Snakes are really nice, and sweet, as they are now. People really do care about each other, and nature, and the Earth, and respect and empathy would be the norm.
I’d have a really hot boyfriend, who is not bossy, and he is very intelligent, and loves my cats (actually, I have that now! Well, hubby is sometimes bossy). All creatures, great and small, would be cared for, and there would be no cruelty. People would be their true selves, and not be phony. Money would not be the end all, be all. We would be as we were in ancient times, and have a great knowledge of medicinal plants, and illness would be rare, and treatable.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, because I am not a Christian, but wasn’t it Jesus who said that all we ever need is in nature?
How’s that?
And then I became cynical.