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Weather: Patchy fog in the morning. Mostly sunny. Highs around 80. Southwest winds around 5 mph. Wednesday Night: Mostly clear. Patchy fog after midnight. Lows in the upper 50s. South winds around 5 mph.
- 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 Flagler County Public Library will be closing for the Thanksgiving Holiday at 5pm on Wednesday, November 27th, and will remain closed through Friday, November 29th.
Schools are closed until Monday.
 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: As you can see from the dearth of anything happening anywhere but in the aisles of grocery stores the city, the county, the country are pretty much shutting down for the rest of the week. It’s as good a day as any, to calm nerves about yesterday’s piece on black cats, to have a look at the almost-new release by Naxos, the workhorse of music labels: Classical for Cats. (Spotify has it here.) Naxos released it last December. It is re-marketing it in hopes of tempting cat owners to buy it as a Christmas gift for their broods. Naturally, it’s more Classical for Cat Owners Who Think Their Cats Give a Crap About Ravel, Mozart or Chopin than it is in any way insightful about what our cats really think of sounds that to them may be no different than tinnitus in chorus. But why not. Still. I couldn’t really associate any of the pieces with cats. The album opens with Tchaikovsky’s Waltz from the Nutcracker (meh), a piece more commonly associated with Christmas and kids than with cats. There’s that sublime adagio from Mozart’s serenade that Salieri swoons over in Amadeus (a terrific scene that manages, as can so rarely be done, to describe the beauty of music in simple words). It’s worth the whole album. Every time I hear this piece, I feel like I’m floating on those oboe notes. (See the Salieri excerpt below, and the full movement performed by the London Symphony Orchestra.) It’s followed by the adagio from one of Beethove’s overly famous sonatas, the Pathetique–anther wondrous memory to me mostly because it was the theme to Adventures in Good Music with Karl Haas on WQXR in New York for decades. Again: I never heard this piece spilling out of the Winter Garden Theater as “Cats” played there starting in 1982. Bach’s “Air on a G String”? The more you get into this album, the more it feels like a Top-40 spin around the classics (there are 31 cuts). Even the Schumann selection from his “Album for the Young” seems off. They picked “Folksong.” I would have picked the Happy Farmer. Then Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze,” from the Hunt Cantata? Pure pandering to sheep, or to wolves who like to bugger sheep, or to happy farmers who like to bugger sheep, but cats? I don’t hear it. Same with the largo from Dvorak’s Symphony from the New World, or a laconic piece by Delius: are cats that out of it? The next-to-last piece, a Piazzolla, is just delicious for whatever kind of animal you are, as is Piazzolla almost always. But for all that, my four cats aren’t interested. They heard Cheryl rattle their kind of Piazzolla downstairs and fled. I can’t blame them. Sorry Naxos: you catalogue is the eighth wonder of the world, but this album isn’t for us.
—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.
River to Sea Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) Meeting
Fall Horticultural Workshops
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Palm Coast Beautification and Environmental Advisory Committee
Flagler Beach City Commission Meeting
For the full calendar, go here.
Books fill vacant spaces better than other collectibles, because they represent a different order of plenitude – they occupy not only the morocco-bound spine span on the shelf but the ampler stretches, the camel caravans of thought-bearing time required to read them through. If you amass a private library of hundreds of thousands of volumes, as the great Caliph Hakim II of Córdoba did before he died, in the year 976, you can feel confident that you have secured a kind of implied immortality: you die owning in reserve all the hours and years it would take those who outlive you to read, not to mention copy over, the words each book contains – and that bank of shelved time is your afterlife. And if you will your books to a cathedral library, or to a university, with the firm injunction that the books you give be chained in perpetuity (a stipulation that a number of English and Italian library benefactors included in their wills), you can’t truly die, or so you may secretly believe: you can’t sink to infernal sub-basement floors or float off to some poorly lit limbo, because your beloved delegation of volumes, the library that surrounded you in life, and suffered with you, and is you, is not tethered firmly to the present; you will live on, linked by iron and brass to the resonant strongbox of the world’s recorded thought. One testator of 1442 asked that his rare books be chained in the library at Guildhall, so that, he says, “the visitors and students thereof be the sooner admonished to pray for my soul.”
–From Nicholson Baker’s “Books as Furniture,” The New Yorker, June 12, 1995.
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