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Weather: A 30 percent chance of showers. Mostly sunny, with a high near 79. Saturday Night: A 50 percent chance of showers. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 61.
- 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:
The Saturday Flagler Beach Farmers Market is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at Wickline Park, 315 South 7th Street, featuring prepared food, fruit, vegetables , handmade products and local arts from more than 30 local merchants. The market is hosted by Flagler Strong, a non-profit.
Second Saturday Plant Sale at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park, 6400 North Oceanshore Blvd., Palm Coast, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Flowers, bushes and hard to find plants. The event is sponsored by the Friends of Washington Oaks. Regular entrance fee applies: $4 per vehicle with one person aboard, $5 for vehicles with more than one person.
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Monthly Meeting, 11 a.m. at Cypress Knoll Golf Club, 53 Easthampton Blvd, Palm Coast. A monthly speaker is featured. Lunch is available for $20 in cash, $21 by credit card, but must be ordered in advance. The lunch menu is available on our website. Lunch may be ordered by sending an email to: [email protected].
Gamble Jam: Musicians of all ages can bring instruments and chairs and join in the jam session, 2 to 4 p.m. The program is free with park admission! Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area at Flagler Beach, 3100 S. Oceanshore Blvd., Flagler Beach, FL. Call the Ranger Station at (386) 517-2086 for more information. The Gamble Jam is a family-friendly event that occurs every second and fourth Saturday of the month. The park hosts this acoustic jam session at one of the pavilions along the river to honor the memory of James Gamble Rogers IV, the Florida folk musician who lost his life in 1991 while trying to rescue a swimmer in the rough surf.
‘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.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. The food pantry is organized by Pastor Charles Silano and Grace Community Food Pantry, a Disaster Relief Agency in Flagler County. Feeding Northeast Florida helps local children and families, seniors and active and retired military members who struggle to put food on the table. Working with local grocery stores, manufacturers, and farms we rescue high-quality food that would normally be wasted and transform it into meals for those in need. The Flagler County School District provides space for much of the food pantry storage and operations. Call 386-586-2653 to help, volunteer or donate.
Notably: From the Department of What Are the Chances. I’d just been reading Steinbeck’s Wayward Bus, one of his lesser-known but better novels, that one from 1947, about a motley group of people, few of them eliciting sympathy at first, stranded in a California relay as their bus is fixed. The strength of the novel is in its mercilessly observed subtexts. Every character is not what he or she seems. Every character is a closet of skeletons. Juan Chicoy is the bus driver. He also owns the relay restaurant and auto repair shop where the first half of the novel takes place, before the travelers board the repaired bus and drive on, under torrential rains (so they can get stuck down the road and allow for more conflicts and a bit of sex to play out between the characters). Juan is married to an angry-woman-hating drunk who drives off every waitress she hires with her bile. Juan has a thing for Our Lady of Guadalupe. He puts his trust in her. She is his copilot. He depends on her to get him out of all his messes. When she fails him, he rebels, he runs off, leaving the bus, which by then has gotten stuck in the mud, with all its passengers, stranded again. He aims for Mexico. He doesn’t get further than a cave, where one of the younger women in the bus, the daughter of a prim and proper Republican couple, joins him for a tryst. Maybe it’s his Lady of Guadalupe. Tryst over, he returns to the bus, fixes it again, and drives on. I had vaguely heard of Our Lady of Guadalupe from time to time. But at the very time when I was nearing the end of the novel I found myself walking to the Publix in Flagler Beach one evening, and there, on the pavement, was the little card you see above: Our Lady of Guadalupe. I don’t see much in coincidences other than coincidences: live enough minutes and you’ll get your share. The absence of coincidences would be the mathematical impossibility. I also don’t, unfortunately believe in ladies–of Guadalupe, of Lourdes or of or of Lebanon. I am no less moved by what they evoke, and what they mean to people, and in that sense they come alive and touch us to the core. Here’s what was on the back side of the card, which I picked up and have since placed as a permanent bookmark in the Steinbeck volume containing the no longer Wayward Bus: “Remember, O most gracious Virgin of Guadalupe, that in your apparitions on Mount Tepeyac you promised to show pity and compassion to all who, loving and trusting you, seek your help and protection. Accordingly, listen now to our supplications and grant us consolation and relief. We are full of hope that, relying on your help, nothing can trouble or affect us. As you have remained with us through your admirable image, so now obtain for us the graces we need. Amen.”
—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.
River to Sea Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) Bicycle/Pedestrian Advisory Committee Meeting
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library
Joint Workshop of Local Governments
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Palm Coast Democratic Club Meetings
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Flagler Beach City Commission Meeting
Reserve at Haw Creek Joint Workshop
Evenings at Whitney Lecture Series
‘The Drowsy Chaperone,’ at St. Augustine’s Limelight Theatre
For the full calendar, go here.
Where the windshield angled in the middle and the center of support went up, sitting on top of the dashboard was a small metal Virgin of Guadalupe painted in brilliant colors. Her rays were gold and her robe was blue and she stood on the new moon, which was supported by cherubs. This was Juan Chicoy’s connection with eternity. It had little to do with religion as connected with the church and dogma, and much to do with religion as memory and feeling. This dark Virgin was his mother and the dim house where she, speaking Spanish with a little brogue, had nursed him. For his mother had made the Virgin of Guadalupe her own personal goddess. Out had gone St. Patrick and St. Bridget and the ten thousand pale virgins of the North, and into her had entered this dark one who had blood in her veins and a close connection with people. His mother admired her Virgin, whose day is celebrated with exploding skyrockets, and, of course, Juan Chicoy’s Mexican father didn’t think of it one way or another. Skyrockets were by nature the way to celebrate Saints’ Days. Who could think otherwise? The rising, hissing tube was obviously the spirit rising to Heaven, and the big, flashing bang at the top was the dramatic entrance to the throne room of Heaven. Juan Chicoy, while not a believer in an orthodox sense, now he was fifty, would nevertheless have been uneasy driving the bus without the Guadalupana to watch over him. His religion was practical.
–From Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus (1949).
Pogo says
@And our world lives now
… under the heel of a monster who worships itself — and the idiots who carry the monster on their shoulders; even as the monster feeds on them, and spits out their bones — waving its little flippers, farting, belching, drooling and scowling its way to hell.
@Jeff Koterba (and FlaglerLive)
Your cartoon is on point.
Russian rouble soars since Donald Trump took office as US ‘appeasing Putin’
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/2024123/russian-rouble-soars-donald-trump-vladimir-putin-ukraine
Pogo says
@And our world lives now under the heel of a monster who worships itself
… and the idiots who carry the monster on their shoulders; as the monster feeds on them, spits out their bones while wagging its little flippers, farting, belching, drooling and scowling its way to hell.
@Jeff Koterba (and FlaglerLive)
Your cartoon is on point.
Russian rouble soars since Donald Trump took office as US ‘appeasing Putin’
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/2024123/russian-rouble-soars-donald-trump-vladimir-putin-ukraine
Ray W, says
Hello Mr. Tristam.
Thank you for today’s thoughts on coincidence.
Having reached an age where, as you so ably point out, coincidence is more a mathematical certainty than a chaotic revelation, I awakened with a start this morning to the idea that it might be wise to attempt to better understand Trump’s perfidy to the Ukrainian people. And then I read your thoughts on the Virgin of Guadalupe and Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus.
Stories are beginning to proliferate about how the Ukrainian army, now blinded by Trump’s order to cut off all forms of American military intelligence of Russian troop movements and plans of attack, are giving way all along the front. Trump’s order to stop giving coordinates to guide American missiles to Russian positions leaves the Ukrainians impotent, despite having the weapons to protect themselves.
Perfidy, according to Merriam-Webster, is “the quality or state of being faithless or disloyal.”
Perhaps many FlaglerLive readers recall my many comments about the Oresteia tragedies, or the three plays of Agamemnon, through which the ancient Greeks struggled with the justice of their law of the debt of blood vengeance.
I searched for the existence of a mythical Greek God of Retribution.
Nemesis, according to Hesiod, a renowned Greek poet, was the “child of Erebus and Nyx, the personifications of darkness and night, respectively.” Other sources ascribe parentage to “the primordial god Oceanus.”
She “was the goddess of divine retribution and revenge. She was revered and feared as a deity who delivered justice, especially against those guilty of hubris, the sin of excessive pride or arrogance before the gods. Unlike other deities who could be benevolent or malevolent, Nemesis was known for her implacable nature.”
“Nemesis was a central figure in Greek tragedies and numerous other literary works, often portrayed as the force that brings about the downfall of the proud and the powerful. As the ‘Goddess of Rhamnous,’ she was worshipped in a temple in the isolated region of Attica, indicating her significant place in the religious and cultural landscape of ancient Greece.”
As I mentioned above, justice to the ancient Greeks prior to the trial of Orestes meant retribution based on the law of the debt of blood vengeance; it did not mean justice under the rule of law, which was the intent of our founding fathers.
It bears repeating the story of King Atreus.
When the father of King Atreus, King Kratos, died, Atreus slew his brother and all his nephews to take the throne of the kingdom. He had an obligation under the law to kill every one of his nephews, because under Greek law of that time, if a son didn’t avenge his own father’s death, he would be prosecuted for violating the law of retribution.
Upon the death of King Atreus, Agamemnon did not fight with his brother for the throne, because Menelaus accepted the lesser kingdom of Sparta as his inheritance. Agamemnon, inheriting the greater part of his father’s kingdom, became known as the King of Kings after he forced the kings of neighboring city-states to bend to his will. Ulysses, Ajax, and to a limited extent, Achilles and his Myrmidons, and many other lesser Greek kings, bent the knee one by one to Agamemnon.
For the moment, the ancient Greek law of debt of blood vengeance for the death of Atreus’ brother and all his sons had ended, and Agamemnon as the descendent of the King was now immune from prosecution under the law.
But Agamemnon had missed an unborn nephew carried by a concubine.
When Paris of Troy carried away from Sparta the wife of Menelaus, Helen, the law of the debt of blood vengeance had to be satisfied. The Greeks assemble their one thousand ship and prepared to sail. While Greek mythology differs on this point, either the port was becalmed or a great northwest wind out of the Black Sea incessantly blew. The armada could not sail. Agamemnon, to appease the gods, tricked his favorite daughter, Iphigenia, to a hastily arranged festival, during which he slew her by fire.
The law of the debt of blood vengeance mandated that Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, kill her husband.
In the ten years that Agamemnon was away, his nephew came of age and became lover to Clytemnestra. Together, they plotted murder, as required by law.
The triumphant Agamemnon returned to Greece, bringing with him one of the many now-enslaved daughters of King Priam of Troy, Cassandra, who had been gifted both the blessing of foresight and the curse of the knowledge that no one would ever believe her.
Before Agamemnon entered his kingdom, Cassandra warned him that he was about to be murdered in his own home. Ignoring her, Agamemnon went inside, where his wife and his nephew murdered him.
The law of the debt of blood vengeance passed to Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, and One of his two surviving daughters, Electra.
Both Orestes and Electra killed their cousin, but she could not kill her mother. Orestes, alone, killed his mother. Upon the death of the nephew, the law of the debt of blood vengeance was satisfied, but what of the murder of Clytemnestra. Electra was innocent, but she then had the debt of blood vengeance to murder her brother, else she be prosecuted for failing to seek retribution.
Horrified by the slaughter of a royal family, the play depicts the Greek world repealing the law of the debt of blood vengeance and installing a law of justice, but only after Orestes was put on trial for the murder of his mother; he was not tried for murdering his nephew. Matricide, it seems, was a higher law than the murder of a nephew.
Long ago, I commented that Socrates hated democracy. But he did not favor monarchy either, nor did he champion dictators or autocrats. Socrates felt that each of those forms of government were deeply flawed. In Socratic thought, only “the one who knows” should rule. Among the differing leaders of democracies, or kings, or or dictators, none fit the Socratic definition of “knowing” how to rule. It was the one who knew better than everyone else who should rule.
The columnist, David Brooks, perhaps the best of several true contemporary conservative writers, upon learning of Trump’s assertion that “only I can fix things”, wrote that the statement was perhaps the least conservative thing anyone could ever say. But it was the most Socratic thing anyone could ever say.
Coincidentally, Greek mythology connects Nemesis with the story of a special egg, from which emerged Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, who marry Menelaus and Agamemnon, respectively.
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Trump’s betrayal is no longer a story of Russian Appeasement; it has become transformed into a story of American perfidy.
Trump may think he, in the Socratic ideology, is the “one who knows” and, therefore, is the one who should rule, but the one who knows cannot be a person who repeatedly lies. If one has to lie to support the validity of a point, then the point he claims to know can never be valid.
Americans elected, if only barely, a vengeful person who lies for vengeful purposes. Yes, Ed P. repeatedly argues that the American people gave Trump a mandate to implement his policies, but I am not sure he fully understands just yet that for the first time in American history, Americans gave a mandate for retribution.
From the very beginning of my commenting on FlaglerLive, I have repeated ad nauseum, the point that America is in the early stages of an age of political violence, the likes of which has not been seen since the 25-year period preceding the outbreak of WWI. It may take decades for the incitement to political violence to peak, much less lessen or end. We will all have to live through the chaos and terror and lies and deceptions.
The Russians had already lost the war. Only the killing remained for the Ukraine to emerge from the war alive and free. Only the perfidious Trump can save the Russians.
Pogo says
Platforming the kkk and nazis and banning me — sick.
@And our world lives now under the heel of a monster who worships itself
… and the idiots who carry the monster on their shoulders; as the monster feeds on them, spits out their bones while wagging its little flippers, farting, belching, drooling and scowling its way to hell.
@Jeff Koterba (and FlaglerLive)
Your cartoon is on point.
Russian rouble soars since Donald Trump took office as US ‘appeasing Putin’
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/2024123/russian-rouble-soars-donald-trump-vladimir-putin-ukraine
Ray W, says
On March 6, 2025, the Department of Labor once again released its Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims.
I reported on this last week, and I wish to do so again, to highlight the unimportance of weekly or monthly economic reports, as they can be so volatile to often be misleading. As an example, last week’s data reflected an unexpected rise in claims, though the four-week rolling average remained stable.
This week’s applications dropped by 21,000 to 221,000, but the four-week rolling average increased by 250. Is it reasonable to assert that last week’s jump in claims was an aberration? For the past 12 months only five weeks had a number higher than last week’s aberrational figure.
Far too many FlaglerLive commenters lack the desire to check facts or figures before they comment. Some of them have proven themselves innumerate, meaning they simply do not understand numbers. They read of a claim asserted by one of the professional lying class members of one of our two political parties and think the aberration cited by the liar is the norm.
One of the more egregious of the professional liars at the top of the Republican Party, our former governor and present Senator, issued a press release some two years ago in March, in which he claimed that almost all of the jobs created during the previous month were part-time jobs.
I obtained his press release. In it he had a link to the government report from which he had drawn his lie. It was true that the report listed over 200,000 more part-time workers than in the previous month, but if you actually read the report, it contained a warning that if a major storm were to occur during the one-week assessment period, many workers who held a full-time position would be counted as part-time employees for the month if they missed a day of work during the assessment week. Taking a 40-hour a week full-time worker down to 32 hours put her into the part-time worker category, but for only that month.
I checked to see if Americans had experienced a major storm during the assessment week. Sure enough, an artic blast had swept across America, spawning over 100 tornadoes in the south and severe blizzards in the far north. The more gullibly stupid among us would fall for the lie by our Senator and believe that the jobs we were creating were mostly part-time jobs.