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Weather: Sunny. Much cooler with highs around 60. North winds 10 to 15 mph. Tonight: Mostly clear in the evening, then becoming mostly cloudy. Not as cool with lows in the upper 40s. Northeast winds 5 to 10 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:
Drug Court convenes before Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols at 10 a.m. in Courtroom 401 at the Flagler County courthouse, Kim C. Hammond Justice Center 1769 E Moody Blvd, Bldg 1, Bunnell. Drug Court is open to the public. See the Drug Court handbook here and the participation agreement here.
The Flagler Beach City Commission meets at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall, 105 South 2nd Street in Flagler Beach. It will consider appointments or reappointments to the Planning and Architectural Review Board and other city committees, and will approve a $21 million loan to rebuild the pier. But the big item on the agenda is the proposed annexation of Veranda Bay. Watch the meeting at the city’s YouTube channel here. Access meeting agenda and materials here. See a list of commission members and their email addresses here.
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Central Park, from noon to 2 p.m. in Central Park in Town Center, 975 Central Ave. Join Bill Wells, Bob Rupp and other members of the Palm Coast Model Yacht Club, watch them race or join the races with your own model yacht. No dues to join the club, which meets at the pond in Central Park every Thursday.
Evenings at Whitney Lecture Series hosted by the University of Florida Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience at 6 p.m. (Note the new time.) Tonight: “From Jellyfish to Sharks: Ocean Swimmers Provide the Blueprints for Next-Gen Underwater Vehicles.” Dr. Brad Gemmell, Associate Professor, Department of Integrative Biology, University of South Florida, will be the speaker. This free lecture will be presented in person at the UF Whitney Laboratory Lohman Auditorium, 9505 Ocean Shore Boulevard, in St. Augustine. Those interested also have the option of registering to watch via Zoom live the night of the lecture. Go here to register for this month’s lecture. See previous lectures here.
The Palm Coast Democratic Club holds its monthly meeting at noon at the Flagler Democratic Party Headquarters in City Marketplace, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite C214, Palm Coast. The June speaker is US Congressional Candidate James Stockton. Noon 32164. Stockton, running to represent Flagler County in Congress. He is the eldest son of a public school bus driver and a heavy equipment operator. He was raised in a home of morals and values based on the principle of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” All are welcome to attend and meet Stockton. This gathering is open to the public at no charge. No advance arrangements are necessary. Call (386) 283-4883 for best directions or (561)-235-2065 for more information.
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.
Notably: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt was a house reviewer for the New York Times from 1969 to 2000, when he moved to the obituary desk in, one supposes, preparation for his own, though he was a mere 66. He died at 84, felled in the second year of the Trump junta. He was liberal, and he especially liked fly-fishing, and he had the luck, this man who wrote 4,000 reviews and essays, to have once been reviewed by the great Donald Hall, the poet who gave us those two fabulous books in his eighth and ninth decades (Essays After Eighty, in 2014, and A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, in 2018, the same year he died, the same year Christopher Lehmann-Haupt died. I must’ve read a few hundred of Christopher’s reviews, and clipped a few. But I was not in this country when, two years before my arrival, he wrote a review of Gore Vidal’s Matter of Fact and Fiction, the book of essays, in 1977. It’s a somewhat positive review, but for this awful third paragraph: “The trouble with being seduced by the Single Explanation, however, is that eventually you get around to wondering what Single Explanation there is for Gore Vidal. Worse, an answer suggests itself. This happens just about where Mr. Vidal is telling us in “West Point,” that, at the age of 14, he ceased to be Eugene L. Vidal, Jr.–Sr. was a product of West Point and an instructor there–and took his mother’s birth-name, Gore. (Only he calls it his “grandfather’s name Gore,” without the appositional comma.) He doesn’t explain just why, except to say that doing so settled some confusion about what the middle initial stood for. (The surgery seems somewhat radical; gory, one is nearly tempted to say.) So we are left to speculate over the psychological implications here, and to conclude that Mr. Vidal’s animus toward everything from West Point to the American Establishment–not to speak of academicians, who are, after all, instructors–boils down to an unresolved hostility toward his father, further evidence of which, some would argue, is Mr. Vidal’s cheerfully admitted homosexuality.” The italics are mine. Vidal’s homosexuality had caused him to be blacklisted for several years, and at least five books, by Orville Prescott, a predecessor of Lehmann-Haupt, so liberal or not, the Times has always had an odd way about the subject. But that line stands out for stupidity. Vidal, who never let a slight pass, addressed it in his Point to Point Navigation memoir in 2006, in whose index Matter of Fact and Fiction is noted, Lehmann-Haupt is not. Vidal replied in a letter to the editor, a letter that does not appear in the Times archives: “This is quintessential New York Times reporting. First, it is ill-written, hence ill-edited. Second, it is inaccurate. Third, it is unintelligent in the vulgar Freudian way. There is no evidence of an ‘unresolved hostility’ toward my father in the pages under review or elsewhere in my work. Quite the contrary. I quote from Two Sisters, a Novel in the form of a Memoir: ‘my father was the only man I ever entirely liked. ..’ Nowhere in my writing have I ‘admitted’ (‘cheerfully’ or dolefully) to homosexuality, or to heterosexuality. Even the dullest of mental therapists no longer accepts the propositon that old-father-plus-clinging-mother-equals-fag-offspring.”
—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.
December 2025
Holiday Plant Class Series
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 10-18, at the Flagler County Public Library
Flagler Beach Library Writers’ Club
Flagler Beach Planning and Architectural Review Board
Palm Coast City Council Meeting
Bunnell Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry Evening Hours
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
In Court: Ex-Firefighter James Melady Docket Sounding
In Court: Kristopher Henriqson
Palm Coast Code Enforcement Board Meeting
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
Flagler Beach Library Book Club
For the full calendar, go here.
Actually, there is no such thing as a homosexual person, any more than there is such a thing as a heterosexual person. The words are adjectives describing sexual acts, not people. Those sexual acts are entirely natural; if they were not, no one would perform them. But since Judaism proscribes the abominable, the irrational rage that Kazin and his kind feel toward homosexualists has triggered an opposing rage. Gay militants now assert that there is something called gay sensibility, the outward and visible sign of a new kind of human being. Thus madness begets madness. I have often thought that the reason no one has yet been able to come up with a good word to describe the homosexualist (sometimes known as gay, fag, queer, etc.) is because he does not exist. The human race is divided into male and female. Many human beings enjoy sexual relations with their own sex; many don’t; many respond to both. This plurality is the fact of our nature and not worth fretting about. Today Americans are in a state of terminal hysteria on the subject of sex in general and of homosexuality in particular because the owners of the country (buttressed by a religion that they have shrewdly adapted to their own ends) regard the family as their last means of control over those who work and consume. For two millennia, women have been treated as chattel, while homosexuality has been made to seem a crime, a vice, an illness.
–From Gore Vidal’s “Sex Is Politics,” Playboy, January 1979.
Pogo says
@FWIW
As stated
https://www.google.com/search?q=liberace+wins+libel+suit
Related
https://www.google.com/search?q=cognitive+dissonance
“The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.”
― Mark Twain
joe says
Speaking of things in your price range:
https://digbysblog.net/2024/12/12/wrap-this-around-his-neck-and-set-it-on-fire/
I guess lowering those prices not as easy as he promised…..over and over and over and over again.
Pierre Tristam says
Digby is still writing? Thank you for reminding me joe. Been reading Digby since the dark ages of the second Bush administration.
joe says
Yes – I have been a reader for at least that long also