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Weather: Mostly sunny. Highs in the lower 80s. South winds around 5 mph. Tuesday Night: Mostly cloudy. A chance of showers after midnight. Lows in the mid 60s. 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. Three new council members will be sworn in today: Mayor Mike Norris and council members Ray Stevens and Ty Miller. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For meeting agendas, audio and video, go here.
County Commission Swearing-In: The Flagler County Commission holds a special meeting at 4 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell, to swear-in two members who won election in November, Pam Richardson and Kim Carney. They will take the places of Donald O’Brien and Dave Sullivan, both two-term commissioners who elected not to run for a third term. Richardson and Carney join Commission Chair Andy Dance and Commissioners Leann Pennington and Greg Hansen.
The Flagler County School Board meets at 6 p.m. in Board Chambers on the first floor of the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. Board members Janie Ruddy, Lauren Ramirez and Derek Barrs will be sworn in, and the board will select a new chair for the coming year. Board meeting documents are available here. The meeting is open to the public and includes public speaking segments.
The Flagler Beach Library Writers’ Club meets at 5 p.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach.
Fall Horticultural Workshops at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE., 6:30 p.m on Tuesdays, 10 a.m. on Fridays. Join master gardeners from the UF/IFAS Agricultural Extension Office for these workshops that cover a variety of horticultural topics. $10 a workshop.
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 quality. |
Notebook: I would rather be covering the murder trial on Judge Nichols’s docket: it’s her first trial as the county’s felony judge, it’s an interesting one–one of those first-degree murder trials of a drug dealer whose product led to the victim’s overdose–since most of these usually end up in pleas, and the only other one that went to trial here led to an acquittal. For good reason. The indictments are only following the law, but the law is a misapplication of justice, especially as first-degree murder: even the cigarette barons faced civil judgments after we learned that they had knowingly sold addictive poison to millions. The cause-and-effect in the case of fentanyl is reduced from years to minutes, sometimes seconds. The end result of the lethality is the same, and the agency of the user, in both cases, cannot be simply overlooked. But this isn’t where I was going with this. I just meant to say that I’d prefer camping out in Courtroom 401 all day than to be traipsing from the City Council to the County Commission to the School Board for all those swearings-in, some of them more momentous than they should have been. This is the end of David Alfin, Colleen Conklin, Cheryl Massaro, Don O’Brien, Dave Sullivan, and of course it’s also the end of Ed Danko (cue Annie). More good than bad is ending, and on the whole, I’m not so sure that more good than bad is picking up where they left off. Congratulations to all the winners: it’s no small feat. Let’s hope they (some of them) don’t feel so conflated with the national heave for boorish, no-holds-barred governance that we end up a Venezuelan province. We’ll have to see. Or endure. Or seek escape routes.
—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.
Palm Coast City Council Meeting
County Commission Swearing-In
Flagler Beach Library Writers’ Club
Flagler County School Board Meeting
Fall Horticultural Workshops
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
Flagler County’s Technical Review Committee Meeting
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
Bridge and Games at Flagler Woman’s Club
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
Flagler County Public Library Book Club
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library
Palm Coast Planning and Land Development Board
For the full calendar, go here.
He clutched my shoulder. “Tiger in the road,” he said. Perhaps forty feet ahead of us a tiger sat in the middle of the track. It filled the track, in fact, and seemed somehow to fill the forest that stretched away on either side as well. Nothing had prepared me for its size or for the palpable sense of menace and power that emanated from it. “His name is Akbar,” Fateh whispered, beginning softly to hum with pleasure at the sight of him. “About five hundred pounds.” The tiger rose slowly to his feet. Everything about him seemed outsized: his big round ruffed face; his massive shoulders and blazing coat; his empty belly that hung in folds and had finally forced him into the open to hunt; his long twitching tail. It seemed inconceivable that such a big, vivid animal could have stayed hidden in this drab open forest for so long. We sat very still in the open Jeep as the tiger stared at us. “He’s a good boy,” Fateh said, still humming. I devoutly hoped so. The tiger turned and cocked his huge head to listen as a sambar called from a clearing off to our left; then, after fixing us with one more steady glance, he slipped silently into the grass. Neither his smiling protector nor his protector’s wary guest had been worth so much as a growl.
–From Geoffrey Ward’s “Tiger in the Road!,” Best American Essays 1987.
Pogo says
@A different tiger
“Look,” whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.
— Final lines, The Nine Billion Names of God, by Arthur C. Clarke
https://urbigenous.net/library/nine_billion_names_of_god.html