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Weather: Partly cloudy. Highs in the lower 70s. Friday Night: Clear, cooler with lows in the lower 40s.
- 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:
Note: Flagler Beach City Hall is closed today due to water intrusion.
Free For All Fridays with Host David Ayres, an hour-long public affairs radio show featuring local newsmakers, personalities, public health updates and the occasional surprise guest, starts a little after 9 a.m. after FlaglerLive Editor Pierre Tristam’s Reality Check. See previous podcasts here. Today’s guests include Palm Coast City Council member Charles Gambaro and Craig McKinney, the city’s economic development manager. On WNZF at 94.9 FM and 1550 AM.
The Scenic A1A Pride Committee meets at 9 a.m. at the Hammock Community Center, 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast. The meetings are open to the public.
Flagler and Florida Unemployment Numbers Released: The state’s Commerce Department released the previous month’s preliminary unemployment numbers for Florida and its 67 counties, at 10 a.m. See the data releases page here.
The Friday Blue Forum, a discussion group organized by local Democrats, meets at 12:15 p.m. at the Flagler Democratic Office at 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite C214 (above Cue Note) at City Marketplace. Come and add your voice to local, state and national political issues. (Note the new location).
Santa returns to Bunnell: The Bunnell Police Department will be escorting Santa through the Bunnell neighborhoods located north of East Moody Boulevard, including Palm Terrace Mobile Home Park and the Grand Reserve Subdivision. When you hear the sirens, go to your window, open the door or head to your yard. The sirens will announce that Santa is near. Be sure to wave and cheer as Santa passes by to show your holiday spirit!
Miracle on 34th Street at Daytona Playhouse, 100 Jessamine Blvd., Daytona Beach. 7:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. on Sunday. $15 for adults, $10 for children. When a department store Santa claims he’s the real deal, his case goes all the way to the Supreme Court. A little girl’s belief makes the difference. Radio style show with live sound effects and holiday carols. Be our studio audience!
Christmas Cabaret at Limelight Theatre, 11 Old Mission Ave, St. Augustine. 7:30 p.m. This Christmas Cabaret concert showcases our talent throughout Northeastern Florida for all to see, with performances of Modern Christmas songs.
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.
Diary: Later this evening Cheryl and I will be driving to Disney Springs to pick up our son Luka from his M&M store, where he works, and to take him down to a wine bar there where he’ll drink his first glass of wine, legally: he turns 21 at 1:07 p.m. today. Twenty-one years since Dr. White sprung him from that Elysian womb and into the cacophonies of Halifax hospital (the noise there really was stunning), preview of a life in this state of sounds and furies that have only gotten louder and more obnoxious since he was born those few months after the second Bush declared victory in Iraq as his brother was clear-cutting Reuben Askew’s environmental legacy in this state. Twenty-one years, disappeared in blinks, though time’s ravages (time’s massacre), like our parental age, is mooted, or at least muted, by the pride and joy we feel, seeing our children fill their space on this planetoid more nobly than we have. I understand less and less our militantly pious society’s demand that we hold explicit and blatant beliefs in a god, an ideology, a flag, a (gasp) president, that we publicly and submissively sing pledges to certain cloth or heroes, when belief in and the heroism of one’s children seems perfectly sufficient, overwhelming at times, and so consoling when contrasted with our own diminishing years and capacities, especially when we get to revel in one’s decline in company of that Elysian love, source of it all. That wine we’ll be drinking, incidentally, won’t be any old French cliché, but Lebanese red.
—P.T.
Now this: From the Luka Collection:
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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.
Nar-Anon Family Group
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
For the full calendar, go here.
Trillions upon trillions of tiny marine organisms that most of us have never heard of—foraminiferans and coccoliths and calcareous algae—capture atmospheric carbon, in the form of carbon dioxide, when it falls as rain and use it (in combination with other things) to make their tiny shells. By locking the carbon up in their shells, they keep it from being reevaporated into the atmosphere, where it would build up dangerously as a greenhouse gas. Eventually all the tiny foraminiferans and coccoliths and so on die and fall to the bottom of the sea, where they are compressed into limestone. It is remarkable, when you behold an extraordinary natural feature like the White Cliffs of Dover in England, to reflect that it is made up of nothing but tiny deceased marine organisms, but even more remarkable when you realize how much carbon they cumulatively sequester. A six-inch cube of Dover chalk will contain well over a thousand liters of compressed carbon dioxide that would otherwise be doing us no good at all. Altogether there is about twenty thousand times as much carbon locked away in the Earth’s rocks as in the atmosphere. Eventually much of that limestone will end up feeding volcanoes, and the carbon will return to the atmosphere and fall to the Earth in rain, which is why the whole is called the long-term carbon cycle. The process takes a very long time—about half a million years for a typical carbon atom—but in the absence of any other disturbance it works remarkably well at keeping the climate stable.
–From Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003).
hendy says
A Madrasha (also known as Madrasa) is an educational institution where Islamic studies are taught. The term “Madrasha” comes from Arabic and means “school” or “place of learning.” However, in many Muslim-majority countries, it is specifically associated with religious education, particularly the study of Islamic theology, the Quran, Hadith (sayings of Prophet Muhammad), Islamic law (Sharia), and Arabic.