To include your event in the Briefing and Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Weather: Mostly cloudy. Highs in the lower 70s. Lows in the mid 50s.
- 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:
In Court: Not Christmas yet: a morning of arraignments, probation violation hearings, bond hearings and pre-trials, and a sentencing in the afternoon.
The Bunnell City Commission meets at 7 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell, where the City Commission is holding its meetings until it is able to occupy its own City Hall on Commerce Parkway in 2025. To access meeting agendas, materials and minutes, go here. The commission is hearing an appeal from a planning board decision denying a variance to the developers of a future, 8,000-home planned unit development. The developers want the open-space minimum requirement reduced from 60 percent to 50 percent. The planning board denied the request.
The Flagler County Beekeepers Association holds its monthly meeting from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Flagler Agricultural Center, 150 Sawgrass Rd., Bunnell (the county fairgrounds). This is a meeting for beekeepers in Flagler and surrounding counties (and those interested in the trade). The meetings have a speaker, Q & A, and refreshments are served. It is a great way to gain support as a beekeeper or learn how to become one. All are welcome. Meetings take place the fourth Monday of every month. Contact Kris Daniels at 704-200-8075.
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.
Notebook: Walking around Volusia Mall recently–an oddly appealing, sadly serene place that silently echoes unsung blues–I saw a man of girth worthy of Grover Cleveland sitting on a bench, his elbows resting on his knees, with an expression of complete and utter, imperious indifference. It would not have been unusual in a mall. This is what we often do when we sit in a mall. We have to be indifferent to the surroundings, otherwise we would become too aware of the surroundings’ indifference. A mall’s enclosure against the universe puts us in our existentially insignificant place, at least as consumers. Except that the girthy man wasn’t being indifferent to the mall, but to the child next to him. The child was crying, begging for his care. The child rose no higher than the man’s knee, and looked no bigger. His cries were tiny staccatos, annoying and grating. He was desperate. If he wasn’t in pain, anyone walking by and seeing him in that state would be, and would then be doubled up in fury at the man’s–the child’s father’s, it was obvious–indifference. It wasn’t a tired indifference. It wasn’t the indifference of a man who looked as if he’d worked all day and was just now spending a little time with his child, a man who’d been up since dawn and just couldn’t take it anymore. This man was putting effort into his indifference. He had the means, the energy to be indifferent. It was a studied, intentional, self-aware indifference. He would at times look at his child, look through his child as if to make him, his own son, see how indifferent he was (is this how Abraham looked at his son before he readied to stab him?), how he would not do the simplest gesture required at a moment like this–picking up the child, comforting him, hugging him. The man would not do that. He would look at his child as if to say: I am more powerful than you, and you will not move me. I am teaching you a lesson. I am reminding you of your place. (If only the man knew his place in the universe, or in this mall.) It’s the sort of indifference that parents of a certain child-rearing ideology. The ideology is studded in the lead of medieval torture implements. It’s the ideology that thinks letting a child “cry it out” is a good thing, that comforting a child encourages sissiness, that a simple gesture of love breeds weakness. Where else do we know of this kind of depravity these days? (We have just elected it.) For all I know the big man, or rather the man who thought himself big, was a liberal anti-Dr. Spock. Whatever he was, he was the picture of cruelty. Cheryl and I couldn’t very well have picked up the child and rocked him for a minute. We’d have been shot and dragged around the mall, roped to the man’s F-150, though this man was no Achilles. He was just a heel. The saddest thing yet was that not a long distance down the mall’s empty alley was the mall’s Santa and his photographing elves, sitting there alone in their enclosure decorated for no one, without a single customer, a single child, a single indulgent parent.
—P.T.
View this profile on Instagram
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.
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center
For the full calendar, go here.
“You – you alone will have the stars as no one else has them…In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing, when you look at the sky at night…You – only you – will have stars that can laugh.”
–From .
