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Weather:
- 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’s show is live from the Palm Coast Community Fair, with attention on the annual college fair. See previous podcasts here. On WNZF at 94.9 FM, 1550 AM, and live at Flagler Broadcasting’s YouTube channel.
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.
St Thomas Episcopal Rummage Sale, St. Thomas Episcopal Church, 5400 Belle Terre Parkway, Palm Coast. St. Thomas has resurrected its annual rummage sale! We are sure everyone will find a prized treasure at this rummage sale. Clothing for all will be the main attraction, also books, small appliances, jewelry, specialty items, household items, linens, baked goods and a café to rest before, during or after your shopping. No worries, we provide shopping bags for your shopping day. This event is open from Friday, February 28th beginning at 9 AM until 2 pm and Saturday, March 1st beginning at 9 am until 1 pm. Sorry no early birds! Your shopping experience is expanded with a special bag sale on Saturday from 12 to 1 of a bag of items for $5.00 or 3 bags for $10.00. All are welcome! Faith, Food and Fun abound at St. Thomas!
Resume Writing Workshop: The Flagler County Public Library is hosting a resume writing workshop at 11 a.m. at the Flagler County Public Library, 2500 Palm Coast Pkwy NW, Palm Coast. The workshop is intended to help job seekers create professional, standout resumes. This hands-on session will cover key strategies for formatting, highlighting skills, and tailoring resumes to specific job opportunities. Participants will also receive tips on avoiding common pitfalls and navigating applicant tracking systems. Whether you’re crafting your first resume or updating an existing one, this workshop is a great opportunity to gain expert guidance and enhance your job search. Don’t miss this chance to build a resume that makes an impact!
Flagler Schools College and Career Fair, 2 to 5 p.m. at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE. Hosted by the Flagler County Education Foundation. Open to the public.
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.
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock, 2 to 5 p.m., Picnic Shelter behind the Hammock Community Center at 79 Mala Compra Road, Palm Coast. It’s a free event. Bring your Acoustic stringed Instrument (no amplifiers), and a folding chair and join other local amateur musicians for a jam session. Audiences and singers are also welcome. A “Jam Circle” format is where musicians sit around the circle. Each musician in turn gets to call out a song and musical key, and then lead the rest in singing/playing. Then it’s on to the next person in the circle. Depending upon the song, the musicians may take turns playing/improvising a verse and a chorus. It’s lots of Fun! Folks who just want to watch or sing generally sit on the periphery or next to their musician partner. This is a monthly event on the 4th Friday of every month.
‘One Slight Hitch,’ at Daytona Playhouse, 100 Jessamine Blvd., Daytona Beach, Adults $25, Seniors $24, Youth $15, 7:30 p.m. except Sunday matinees and special March 1 matinee. It’s Courtney’s wedding day, and mom is making sure everything is perfect. Then, like in any good farce, the doorbell rings, and all hell breaks loose. So much for perfect.
‘The Drowsy Chaperone,’ at St. Augustine’s Limelight Theatre, 11 Old Mission Avenue, St. Augustine, 7:30 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, $35. When wealthy widow, Mrs. Tottenham, hosts the wedding of the year, she gets a lot more than a write-up in the society pages. This magical piece of meta-theatre and playful, heartfelt parody of the 1920s musical comedy features a chirpy jazz age score by Tony-winning collaborators. Book here.
Notably: “Don DeLillo has a strange way of prophesying the inevitable.” Not to go DeLillo on you, but the line is in quotes because its cheap cleverness masks its fallacies: good novelists tell the future not because they see that far, but because they read the present the way a physician reads an EKG or a strand of DNA. It’s usually all there. So there is no such thing as prophesying the inevitable, especially when it is inevitable. There’s only filling in the blanks, the void, with an elegance and a lucidity that may leave the rest of us aghast, but that must feel inevitable (there it is again) to the novelist. Either DeLillo or his publisher had placed a gray fuzzy image of the befogged Twin Towers on the spine of his Underworld in 1997, prophesying, as did parts of that book, the coming collapse, the way Salman Rushdie in his not-so great Fury, published months before the attacks in 2001, has a Manhattan Urdu cab driver railing that “Islam will cleanse this street of godless motherfucker bad drivers… Infidel fucker of your underage sister, the inferno of Allah awaits you and your unholy wreck as well,” and so on. In Falling Man, DeLillo’s 2007 novel about the attacks, Martin, the past-middle-age German lover of one of the characters, says: “There is a word in German. Gedankenübertragung. This is the broadcasting of thoughts. We are all beginning to have this thought, of American irrelevance. It’s a little like telepathy. Soon the day is coming when nobody has to think about America except for the danger it brings. It is losing the center. It becomes the center of its own shit. This is the only center it occupies.” This is almost 20 years ago. DeLillo as seer of what we all saw, if we looked even a little, within hours of the fall of the towers, not because of the fall, but because of the way the little Bush responded, and kept responding–like the frightened, cowardly brute who mistook his own version of the Urdu cabdriver’s fury for strength as he committed the nation to 20 years of folly and accelerated decline. Nina, the wife of the main character, replies to Martin: “Despite everything, we’re still America, you’re still Europe. You go to our movies, read our books, listen to our music, speak our language. How can you stop thinking about us? You see us and hear us all the time. Ask yourself. What comes after America?” To which Martin replies: “I don’t know this America anymore. I don’t recognize it,” he said. “There’s an empty space where America used to be.” We mourn this loss, the way we mourn the loss of a friend whose flaws had once been a reason to love him, until he became the flaws and began to befog us in them.
—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.
Flagler County Commission Workshop
Flagler Woman’s Club Forum for Flagler Beach City Commission Candidates
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Scenic A1A Pride Meeting
St Thomas Episcopal Rummage Sale
Resume Writing Workshop
Friday Blue Forum
Flagler Schools College and Career Fair
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
‘The Drowsy Chaperone,’ at St. Augustine’s Limelight Theatre
‘One Slight Hitch,’ at Daytona Playhouse
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Flagler Beach All Stars Beach Clean-Up
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
SpringFest 2025 at Joanne B. King Park in Bunnell
For the full calendar, go here.
He worked his way through the frozen zone, south and west, passing through smaller checkpoints and detouring around oth-ers. There was a Guard troop in battle jackets and sidearms and now and then he saw a figure in a dust mask, man or woman, obscure and furtive, the only other civilians. The streets and cars were surfaced in ash and there were garbage bags stacked high at curbstones and against the sides of buildings. He walked slowly, watching for something he could not identify. Everything was gray, it was limp and failed, storefronts behind corrugated steel shutters, a city somewhere else, under permanent siege, and a stink in the air that infiltrated the skin. He stood at the National Rent-A-Fence barrier and looked into the haze, seeing the strands of bent filigree that were the last standing things, a skeletal remnant of the tower where he’d worked for ten years. The dead were everywhere, in the air, in the rubble, on rooftops nearby, in the breezes that carried from the river. They were settled in ash and drizzled on windows all along the streets, in his hair and on his clothes.
–From Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007).
Ray W, says
I have commenting for over a year now on the impact of drought on crop yields and the connected effect of rising cost of cattle feed on retail beef prices at the grocery store. Obviously, I was responding to a number of FlaglerLive comments posted by the more gullibly stupid among us that blamed Biden for the rising beef prices.
I found a Reuters news article about the current status of the Canadian beef industry. The reporter wrote:
“After years of drought raised feed costs, North American farmers culled animals and did not rebuild their herds, so the beef cattle population on both sides of the border had been declining even before the threat of U.S. tariffs on Canadian exports.”
To me, this reduced heat count issue raises the question of what might this mean for grocery beef prices we might soon be paying in the near- and medium-future, should a 25% tariff on all Canadian products be imposed as threatened?
As a foundational series of statements, the author of the article asserts:
1 – that Canada is the world’s tenth largest beef producer.
2 – it is the eighth largest beef exporter in the world.
3 – 75% of Canada’s beef exports go to America.
4 – today’s American cattle headcount is the lowest in 74 years.
5 – today’s Canadian cattle head count is the lowest in 36 years.
6 – historically, American ranchers send young cattle to Canada for fattening where, when fully grown, they are slaughtered, and the meat is returned to the U.S.
7 – America is in such a beef deficit right now that foreign ranchers from as far away as Australia are selling cows to American importers, despite the distances involved.
8 – that Canada’s government-backed Farm Credit Canada has been encouraging ranchers to expand their herds, but Canadian ranchers, uneasy about tariffs, are not doing so. Farm Credit Canada’s chief economist says that Canadian ranchers “might sit this one out for 12 months, sit this one out for six months.”
9 – a Winnipeg feed lot operator “quit buying beef cattle in November after the election of U.S. President Donald Trump made tariffs on Canadian exports seem like a serious risk.” His family’s operation has room for 3,000 cattle, but more than 1,000 of the stalls are empty. The stalls are usually filled from November until the following summer.
10 – with fewer feed lot operators filling stalls, grain sales for feed are down. An Alberta feedgrains trader told Reuters: “It’s killing the business.”
11 – impending tariffs are prompting “many” Canadian beef operators to “cash out by sending all the animals they can, including aging cows and young female breeding stock, into the meat market.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
If you are gullibly stupid enough to blame Biden for rising beef prices, when years of drought and heat prompted ranchers to reduce herd sizes, what lies will you concoct when Trump’s tariffs on Canadian exports into our country trigger further disruptions in the American beef marketplace and significant price rises occur in the future?
We are already sourcing beef from as far away as Australia. I have watched a documentary on the huge ships that transport live cattle from Australia to foreign markets. The ships are not cheap to operate. If any cow shows signs of disease, it is immediately killed and shoved overboard, so as to limit any possible spread of disease.
Egg prices rose because of the spread of a virulent form of bird flu, triggering the slaughter of over a hundred million egg-laying hens, and the gullibly stupid among us blamed Biden and not the bird flu.
Oy, vey!
Ray W, says
This is a follow up to the comment about beef prices.
The Daily Mail published an article about changes in the potato marketplace. In the last 10 years, the price of potato chips has increased over 50%, from $4.27 to $6.47.
Some of the gullibly stupid FlaglerLive commenters among us might argue that the Biden administration is solely responsible for the increase, just as they always do for anything they don’t like. They would be wrong to think that, as they so often are.
I didn’t know that potatoes simply stop growing when soil temperatures rise above 85 degrees.
For about two years now, I have commented on the effect of drought and heat on crop yields, occasionally writing that Idaho had suffered such a crop failure two years ago that Maine potato distributors had to export potatoes to Idaho to stock Idaho grocery stores.
This past year, according to the reporter, the entire state of Idaho saw an average high temperature of 83 degrees during July. A LeHigh County, Pennsylvania crop specialist commented: “If it’s a month of high temperatures, a potato crop will stop growing and not come back.”
According to the reporter, potatoes grow best when daytime temperatures range between 60 and 65 degrees. Numerous nighttime temperatures below 57 degrees are also ideal.
I also did not know that Pennsylvania is home to more potato chip factories than any other state, giving it the title of “Snack Food Capital of the World.”
The prime agricultural region in Pennsylvania for growing potatoes is its northwest, with its higher elevation, ideal temperature ranges, ample water supplies and more consistent cloud cover. Lancaster County is one of the top-producing potato regions in the state. Erie County, too. Given the proximity of the fields to the factories, transportation costs are relatively low.
In recent years, however, an additional 15 days of daytime heat of 90 degrees or above each year have impacted crop yields. And the number of warm nights above 65 degrees are on the rise.
Pennsylvania chip factories have begun buying more and more potatoes from Florida’s spring crop and from the far northwest. Transportation costs are higher, but the factories need the potatoes. And drought and heat in the far northwest means reduced water supplies for a crop that relies on ample water and moderate.
In 2011, state researchers, affiliated with Cornell University, started working on a drought- and heat-resistant variety of potato. The research yielded the Lamoka brand of potato that not only withstands less tolerant climate conditions but has a longer storage life. Now, Pennsylvania farmers can keep some of their autumn harvest in storage and sell it when chip factories need it in the spring, without transporting potatoes from Florida.
Make of this what you will.
Ray W, says
The January “personal consumption expenditure” (PCE) price index came out earlier today, as did the companion “core” PCE price index, which strips out the more volatile food and energy components.
Here are some bullet points from the document:
– PCE prices rose 0.3% for the month. For the past 12 months, PCE prices rose 2.5%.
– Core PCE prices rose 0.3% for the month. For the past 12 months, core PCE prices rose 2.6%.
– Personal income was expected to show a rise of 0.5% for the month, but it actually rose 0.9%.
– Personal spending, despite the rise in personal income dropped 0.2%, against an expected gain of 0.1%.
– According to Jose Rasco, chief investment officer for HSBC Global Private Banking and Wealth Management’s Americas division, the inflation report was “good, but we’re not done.”
– Goods prices rose 0.5% for the month, led by a 0.9% rise in automobile and parts prices, plus a 2% rise in gasoline prices.
– While the public relies more on CPI data, the Fed relies more on PCE data.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Just another good month in a multi-year string of good months of economic data. The Wall Street Journal was correct when it wrote that President Trump was about to inherit an economy that was the “envy of the world.” The unexpected drop in consumer spending hints at future issues, but one month does not a trend make.