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Weather: Sunny. Highs in the mid 60s. Northwest winds 10 to 15 mph. Monday Night: Clear. Patchy frost after midnight. Lows in the upper 30s.
- 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:
Felony court is not in session today.
The Flagler County Commission meets at 9 a.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 E. Moody Boulevard, Building 2, Bunnell. 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.
The Flagler County Commission meets in workshop at 1 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell, to discuss rules and procedures of the commission and go through committee assignments for the year.
Teens and Tweens: Donuts with an Advocate, 4 to 5 p.m. at Flagler County Public Library, 2500 Palm Coast Pkwy NW, Palm Coast. Questions about life, healthy relationships, finding resources: this is for you, hosted by Ren from the Family Life Center. In the Teen spot. For ages 10-18.
The Beverly Beach Town Commission meets at 6 p.m. at the meeting hall building behind the Town Hall, 2735 North Oceanshore Boulevard (State Road A1A) in Beverly Beach. See meeting announcements here.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center: Nightly from 6 to 9 p.m. at Palm Coast’s Central Park, with 55 lighted displays you can enjoy with a leisurely stroll around the pond in the park. Admission to Fantasy Lights is free, but donations to support Rotary’s service work are gladly accepted. Holiday music will pipe through the speaker system throughout the park, Santa’s Village, which has several elf houses for the kids to explore, will be open, with Santa’s Merry Train Ride nightly (weather permitting), and Santa will be there every Sunday night until Christmas, plus snow on weekends! On certain nights, live musical performances will be held on the stage.
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.
Notebook: In a 2012 reconsideration of A Clockwork Orange, the 1962 novel that made him mildly famous when it was published, and world-famous when Stanley Kubrick directed the movie in 1971, Anthony Burgess wrote this: “Novelists put dirty language into the mouths of their characters, and they show these characters fornicating or going to the toilet. Moreover, it is not a useful trade, as is that of the carpenter or the pastry cook. The novelist passes the time for you between one useful action and another; he helps to fill the gaps that appear in the serious fabric of living. He is a mere entertainer, a sort of clown.” It is a strange if not defined understanding of what “useful” is. More surprising for a novelist: “His use of words is not to be taken too seriously. The President of the United States uses words, the physician or garage mechanic or army general or philosopher uses words, and these words seem to relate to the real world, a world in which taxes must be levied and then avoided, cars have to be run, sicknesses cured, great thoughts thought and decisive battles engaged. No creator of plots or personages, however great, is to be thought of as a serious thinker—not even Shakespeare.” Burgess had the writer’s tendency to shock (this is the author of A Clockwork Orange, after all, a novel premised on shock). But this is a sadly materialist, reductive view of life, of what he calls “the real world,” especially for a novelist (he wrote 50 books after being diagnosed with a brain tumor, the first three written at top speed in order to get them published and leave a bit of money for his wife and son after his death. Naturally, he did not die on schedule). Is the “real world,” the “serious fabric of living” to be reduced to paying taxes, fixing cars, fighting wars (killing!), bypassing hearts? Is that what we live for? To count the days and pay our dues in an endless loop of dues and bills-paying? I thought it was the reverse: we toil to live. We toil and pay taxes and hopefully survive the bypass in order that we may not merely live but, if we’re lucky, love, life. What is life at heart–in its only truly valuable essence–but the chance to know beauty, pleasure, to be epicureans, to know love and truth–if we’re lucky–and to avoid pain? Aren’t books and literature among the more aesthetically easy ways to live? How are three hours spent on a couch with Watch the North Wind Rise or hiking the Badlands of South Dakota any less “useful” to a life than getting an oil change? How is the oil change–or the bypass–more useful, rather than a pitiful interruption of life as it ought to be lived? “But don’t read like children read, to have fun,” Flaubert wrote a correspondent, “nor even the way the ambitious like to read, to learn. Read to live.” To Flaubert, reading was life. (He would not have approved of Updike: “My purpose in reading has ever secretly been not to come and judge but to come and steal,” Updike tells us in Odd Jobs). Or as Philip Roth put it: “I read fiction to be freed from my own suffocatingly narrow perspective on life and to be lured into imaginative sympathy with a fully developed narrative point of view not my own. It’s the same reason that I write.”
—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.
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Friday Blue Forum
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Second Saturday Plant Sale at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Meeting
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
For the full calendar, go here.
Maybe Mr Hung with his shrine to Victor Hugo is right: to make a book, even one so inadequate as this wretched copy you now read, is to learn that the only appropriate feeling to those who live within its pages is love. Perhaps reading and writing books is one of the last defences human dignity has left, because in the end they remind us of what God once reminded us before He too evaporated in this age of relentless humiliations–that we are more than ourselves; that we have souls. And more, moreover. Or perhaps not. Because it clearly was too big a burden for God, this business about reminding people of being other than hungry dust, and really the only wonder is that He persevered with it for so long before giving up.
—From Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish (2001).
Pogo says
@FWIW
42
— Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
https://www.google.com/search?q=Hitchhiker's+Guide+to+the+Galaxy
And now this — or why, IMO, Christmas is better than Halloween (which is every day in the shadow of trump):
“… In all of the tinselly tangle, I think my view is best summed up by Nathan Heller, who wrote that drawing clear battle lines between secular and religious Christmas music was like “insisting on a basic difference between hot cross buns and Danishes”. At the end of the day, they both make a good snack with a cup of tea.”
https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/4804/an-atheists-guide-to-christmas-music
Pogo says
@Elsewhere — FWIW
Emoji says
👑 Trump need never have worried about tariffs, he could easily avoid them by ✈️ to anywhere in the 🌎 on the slightest whim if he wished. To indulge in whatever pleasures he pleased.🏌️🥃👠🍔🍟
Now, once again, he can do so in the best way possible, 🆓 on someone else’s 🪙.
🇺🇲 , 👑 Trump’s 🏧.
RK says
Any comment about Joe’s pardon of Hunter from anyone?
Pierre Tristam says
Still cleaning up vomit from keyboard. Tomorrow’s cartoon should take care of it.
Dennis C Rathsam says
Once again a day late & a Biden short! For all you folks that drink the Biden kool aid…. He has lied to you for 50 years. You ate it up like a child eats ice cream! Next will be his brother, & daughter, & everyone in his pay for play empire! He spouted on every news channel, he wouldnt pardon him. “No one is above the law” ( unless your a BIDEN) Lies, Cover Ups, Steadfast deniles. The liar & chief, money laundering, child trafficing!!!! His legacy, respect, all gone. Biden has put his family fortune, before the American people A tratior. Pierre? Are you going to act like Hillary for 4 years, or can you find some new material. Your party is in dissaray, a ship without a rudder. Harris/Waltz set back the democratic party 10 years. She failed to control her spending during her run for the presidency, Imajine how she would have handled our money?
James says
Biden pardon ed his son? Oh well, too bad.
Get use to the pardons Rathsam, there are plenty coming in the new year.
Just an observation.
Mom.a Mia says
You just described Trump! Lol
Laurel says
RK: Yes, I’m glad! You can read my comment under the cartoon.
FlaPharmTech says
Democrat here. I applaud President Biden for pardoning his son. Dems are learning to play the game of trump pollies.
Pogo says
@Speaking while it’s still possible
Any comment on the transition of the federal government, e g., the FBI, becoming Herr trump’s Gestapo?
Any comments on the imminent pardon, en masse, of the goons who pillaged the capital?
It will really be interesting when the actual confiscation of firearms and ammo starts.
Sherry says
Thank You POGO!
James says
Those “goons” as you call them are fine upstanding citizens… nay… patriots. Patriots of the new Republic of Trump. They will indeed be pardoned and then immediately knighted. Each to sit in waiting at the table of “Trump The Great,” in the throne room of the royal castle once known as the Mar-a-Lago Club and Resort. Out from which they will ride upon their mighty gleaming Tesla Grill Masters… oops, sorry, Cybertrucks.
Out, out to the distant hinterlands between charging stations to ensure that their majesty’s decrees are dutifully obeyed by all in the land.
NOT.
Laurel says
James: When I was a kid, I went to Washington D.C. with my eighth grade class to visit our historic center of government. We went to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It was roped off with a red velvet rope, which we all stood around. We were told that if we went inside that rope, we would be shot. Since there was an armed guard standing nearby, we believed it. Would he have really shot someone? Can’t say, but we had respect for our country, and the unknown soldier buried there, and played by the rules.
I can’t tell you how it looks to me to see people with Trump flags and Rebel flags crawling up the walls of the Capital of our country. I can’t tell you how it feels to see these treasonous people breaking into our historic Capital. I can’t tell you what I thought when the President of the United States sat by and watched with his mouth shut for three hours, when he could have stopped it immediately. But, since he thought it was for his benefit, he sat by and let it happen. I cannot express how I would feel if he pardons these treasonous people and call them patriots.
So, you are correct.
It’s a sad time of our country.
James says
It is indeed a sad time Laurel… and a rather strange time as well.
Who would think that the Hummer EV would be a more reasonable choice in comparison to something like the Tesla Cybertruck?
Can the Cybertruck “crab walk” and features all-wheel drive?
Sure, it may still weigh a ton or two more than the average suv on the road, but then ALL electric vehicles weigh in over the average due to current battery technology… including the Cybertruck.
And you probably can get a Hummer EV in clear stainless steel as an option.
As for the Cybertruck, it’s core body design has potential, but is too stark in it’s current form.
And I doubt it would be easy for the average truck enthusiast to modify. Is it’s suspension integrated with the drivetrain such a way that it precludes the addition of an aftermarket lift kit? Can you add a winch to the front? How about a set of utility lights?
All of these things, a little more lift, larger tires, some (round) frontend spotlights, a deck for a winch and many other improvements would go a long way in making the Cybertruck not only look better, but actually a useful answer to the practical needs and desires of those interested in such a purchase.
As it is, it should be called the “Tailgater,” a mobile barbeque… the only pickup that you can drive to a game, open the back, toss in a bag of charcoal briquettes and have a cookout.
Strangely enough, another novel feature they could have capitalize on with an add-on “solar panel powered rotisserie and fresnel lens package.”
Just an opinion.
Pogo says
@J
Prolly be a nice casket for asshole billionaires to join the cosmos; the number one can launch himself and the rest — he’s already demonstrated it.
Elon, get to work on that zero-g beer bong for your tomb.
Laurel says
James: As you are very well aware, there are probably around three “truck enthusiasts” on the planet who are interested in the cybertruck.
FORD! CHEVY! The age old battle cry, still relevant today.
James says
And those three probably work for Tesla. :-)
FlaPharmTech says
Yeah, it’s scary. We resist and persist.