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Weather: Partly sunny, with a high near 71. Breezy, with a north wind 15 to 17 mph, with gusts as high as 26 mph. Friday Night: Mostly cloudy, with a low around 62.
- 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:
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. Today: members of the Palm Coast city administration talk about the city’s utility infrastructure and rate hikes ahead. See: “Palm Coast Plans to Sharply Raise Water-Sewer Rates and Borrow $456 Million to Finance Needs, Dwarfing Previous Debt.” See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM, 1550 AM, and live at Flagler Broadcasting’s YouTube channel.
A Collective Bargaining Session with the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 4807 and the City of Palm Coast will be held at 1 p.m.in the Palm Harbor Conference Room 2nd Floor, City Hall, 160 Lake Avenue, Palm Coast, Florida. The meeting is open to the public. If you have any questions regarding this notice, please contact Kaley Cook, City Clerk at 386-986-3713.
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.
Notably: Driving south on Belle Terre Parkway in Palm Coast earlier this month–on my way to the courthouse: a detail that, in retrospect, is more relevant than I knew–I fell behind this van and its vomitus of bile taken right out of the Westboro Baptist Church’s liturgy, starting with that “Taliban/al-qaeda hunting permit” (it is funny of course, but it doesn’t make it or the van owner’s morals less vile for plastering it for us all to be degraded by it, especially when the plasterer is likely one of those “mama bears” who thinks her/his/its child should not be exposed to certain books) and ending with that capitalized finale. Of course the bearer is from a Baptist Church. The backwindow emesis reminded me of a passage in Jeff Sharlet’s Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War, published in 2023 when most of us thought another reign by the deranged one was impossible, but not Sharlet. He knew we were already living that reign even then. He described the Church of Glad Tidings in Yuba City just north of Sacramento (it’s strategically located in the pit of a Golden State Highway cloverleaf): “Glad Tidings sat by railroad tracks that cut through agricultural fields. Kids lined up outside in the dry and dusty air to ride Train to Glory, an elaborate golf cart made to look like a locomotive. Inside, the first thing I noticed was the pulpit: It was made of swords. A red-hilted shaft of steel plunged into the stage, intersected midpoint by two black-hilted blades to form an upside-down triangle. Racked like rifles beside the swords were three tall shofars, the ram’s-horn trumpets used in Judaism, pornographically long, “Shofar, so good, Pastor Dave would say when a member of his flock blew his own.” God, guns and mass shootings.
—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.
May 2025
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
Peps Art Walk Near Beachfront Grille
Murder at Shivering Timbers Murder Mystery Dinner Show Fundraiser
RockabillieWillie At City Repertory Theatre
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
Al-Anon Family Groups
RockabillieWillie At City Repertory Theatre
For the full calendar, go here.
“Parkland,” I write, as if that will mean much to a reader a year from now. The 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, where a young Trump supporter who had expressed interest online in killing Blacks, Jews, and immigrants murdered seventeen people, was one of twenty-four such shootings resulting in death or injury that year. “Parkland” for a while became synonymous with the horror, but like “Sandy Hook” before it-2012, twenty-seven dead-and “Columbine” before that-1999, seventeen dead-“Parkland” will soon enough fade, just as “January 6,” may, by the time you read this, be relegated to a footnote within an ongoing time-line of such “patriotism.”
–From Jeff Sharlet’s The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War (2023). .
Wow says
And you’d think the “pro-life” faction might have something to say about it.
Crickets.
Skibum says
The embryo slowly develops into a fetus without any concept of how safe and protected it’s existence is in the womb. But when a baby is born and thrust into this world, all bets are off. Far too many of those who quote scripture and rail about being “pro life” before a pregnancy even becomes a viable life seem to have somewhat of a reverse epiphany once the child is old enough to start school and faces the ever present danger of never having the opportunity to graduate and thrive as an adult due to the threat of being massacred by another child with a gun on school grounds who has evil intentions in their heart. The once singular chant of “save the children” soon evaporates within the conservative, pseudo-Christian, gun happy cult and culture to the point that all that is left, besides many more lifeless young bodies lying in graves, are “thoughts and prayers” while those who have the power to change this outrage by being elected to DO SOMETHING, simply do nothing in order to mollify their maga base. And more children die because these pseudo-Christian cultists choose to worship and protect what was written on a document more than two centuries ago over live, breathing human beings whose lives, precarious as they are, are being further endangered, victimized and slaughtered while the maga cutists of religiosity avert their eyes at the horror they have the power, and ordained guidance to prevent if they so choose!
Sherry says
@Wow. . . Correct!
Those you speak of are NOT Pro Life, they are only Pro Fetus! They are in favor of “forced birth” no matter the circumstances. They are only concerned for the life of the “fetus”, not the resulting child. Once actually “born” that child is on it’s own in the ever increasing “savagery” of life in the US. Multiple “school murders”= the idiotic idea of putting even MORE guns out there. “Social Programs” to help feed the children= “let the unvetted, inexperienced DOGE geeks rip those programs apart”, and “cut that funding to the bone”! Because those sinful second class women who had those babies did NOT do the “Christian” thing and close their legs. Right? What ignorant, horrific hypocrisy!!!
Skibum says
So true, Sherry. And yet, our current VP has the unmitigated gall to call some of his Democrat counterparts and constituents “childless cat ladies” while drumph and the billionaire standing in the Oval Office and pulling all of drumph’s puppet strings bask in the glow of cutting programs, gutting and trying to close entire agencies devoted to helping children and families while they have servants at their every beck and call, and know THEIR kids won’t be touched or negatively affected by their cruel actions. This is NOT what our federal government was formed or empowered to do, and even if we are able to claw back funding and entire agencies after these blood suckers are gone years down the road, the scope of the damage done will surely be widespread and long-lasting… not to mention the fact that our allies and nations around the world may never trust or respect us again for the damage we have done to ourselves and the world order. And still, school children keep dying unnecessarily… ho hum says the maga cult, unless, of course, one of those dead children is one of their own and they finally, belatedly, see the light and leave the cult.
Sherry says
Right On Skibum! Now that I know more about you :) I admire and respect you even more. So grateful for your kindred spirit!