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Weather: Mostly sunny. A slight chance of showers in the morning, then showers likely with a chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the lower 90s. Chance of rain 60 percent. Tuesday Night: Mostly cloudy. Showers likely with a chance of thunderstorms in the evening, then a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms after midnight. Lows around 70. Chance of rain 60 percent.
- 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 Palm Coast City Council meets in workshop at 9 a.m. at City Hall. For agendas, minutes, and audio access to the meetings, go here. For meeting agendas, audio and video, go here.
The Flagler County School Board’s information workshop has been cancelled.
The Flagler County School Board meets at 6 p.m. in Board Chambers on the first floor of the Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. Board meeting documents are available here. The meeting is open to the public and includes public speaking segments.
Budgeting by Values: A Free, Virtual Class to Learn Budgeting Skills, 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. every fourth Tuesday of the month organized by Flagler Cares and Truist Bank, and presented by Financial Inclusion Leader Vladimir Rodriguez. To sign up or get information, call 386/319-9483, text 386/986-0107, or email [email protected].
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy, 8 p.m. at Cinematique Theater, 242 South Beach Street, Daytona Beach. General admission is $8.50. Every Tuesday and on the first Saturday of every month the Random Acts of Insanity Comedy Improv Troupe specializes in performing fast-paced improvised comedy.
Storytime: I don’t know where “That Evening Sun” falls in the official pantheon of William Faulkner’s short stories, wherever that pantheon may be. In mine, it crowds in among his many better ones. The narrator remembers a few nights from 15 years before when he was a boy in Jefferson, when Nancy, a Black woman, did the family’s wash and impressed the boy and his siblings when she’d bundle and balance a mass of linen on her head, set a straw hat on top of it all, and walk self-assured through any obstacle. It “never bobbed nor wavered, even when she walked down into the ditch and up the other side and stooped through the fence.” She could balance the family’s laundry on her head. She was not as deft with her common-law husband Jesus after he learns that she is pregnant with a white man’s child. The implication is that she’d been raped. (She was also beaten senseless after she demanded the money a white customer owed her. She ended up in jail and tried to hang herself.) “‘I aint nothing but a n—,’ Nancy said. ‘It aint none of my fault.'” Jesus doesn’t care. He disappears. (After Faulkner submitted the story to H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury, Mencken demanded that Jesus’s name be changed to Jubah and a sexual metaphor be excised. Faulkner restored the cuts when the story appeared in These 13, the 1931 collection that included “A Rose for Emily.”) She is convinced that he is going to murder her, that he’s hiding somewhere, ready to spring at her when no one is around. She takes refuge at her employer’s house. The children understand nothing. They make fun of her fears. She is all self-abnegation, they are all caddy and cruel, bickering and getting on her case. Their father allows her to spend a night at the family’s house, but his wife doesn’t allow that to go on. “I can’t have Negroes sleeping in the bedrooms,” she says. She wants her husband to call the cops. But the officers can’t find Jesus if Nancy hasn’t seen him. She’s on her own. She asks the children to walk her back to her house and stay the night with her there. “She was talking loud when we crossed the ditch and stooped through the fence where she used to stoop through with the clothes on her head. Then we came to her house. We were going fast then. She opened the door. The smell of the house was like the lamp and the smell of Nancy was like the wick, like they were waiting for one another to begin to smell. She lit the lamp and closed the door and put the bar up. Then she quit talking loud, looking at us.” She begs them to stay. She is all terror. They are all afraid with an otherworldly terror particular to children–that their parents won’t be happy with them being gone. They have no idea why Nancy is afraid, no sympathy, no capability of empathy. Into the night the children’s father comes to get them and Nancy tells him she got the sign Jesus was coming for her. He’d left “a hog bone, with blood meat still on it,” on the table. “He’s out there. When yawl walk out that door, I gone.” “Gone where, Nancy?” one of the children asks, still understanding nothing. They leave her sitting by the fire: that aloneness comparable to the lonely death we all die. We never know what happens to her, but we can guess. The children never know her terror. They keep teasing each other on their way home, oblivious to the grave they left behind, though the narrator’s memory suggests that something registered enough to be remembered, even if still without conscience. The story’s empathy with primal fear skims over the memory like the smell of Nancy’s house, which stays with you long after you’ve read the story.
—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
River to Sea Transportation Planning Organization (TPO) Meeting
Separation Chat: Open Discussion
Flagler County Commission Workshop
The Circle of Light A Course in Miracles Study Group
Weekly Chess Club for Teens, Ages 9-18, at the Flagler County Public Library
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Palm Coast Concert Series
For the full calendar, go here.
So after a while we quit chunking the cabin and went back home. When she finally came, it was too late for me to go to school. So we thought it was whisky until that day they arrested her again and they were taking her to jail and they passed Mr Stovall. He was the cashier in the bank and a deacon in the Baptist church, and Nancy began to say: “When you going to pay me, white man? When you going to pay me, white man? It’s been three times now since you paid me a cent…” Mr Stovall knocked her down, but she kept on saying, “When you going to pay me, white man? It’s been three times now since…” until Mr Stovall kicked her in the mouth with his heel and the marshal caught Mr Stovall back, and Nancy lying in the street, laughing. She turned her head and spat out some blood and teeth and said, “It’s been three times now since he paid me a cent.” That was how she lost her teeth, and all that day they told about Nancy and Mr Stovall, and all that night the ones that passed the jail could hear Nancy singing and yelling. They could see her hands holding to the window bars, and a lot of them stopped along the fence, listening to her and to the jailer trying to make her stop. She didn’t shut up until almost daylight, when the jailer began to hear a bumping and scraping upstairs and he went up there and found Nancy hanging from the window bar. He said that it was cocaine and not whisky, because no nigger would try to commit suicide unless he was full of cocaine, because a nigger full of cocaine wasn’t a nigger any longer. The jailer cut her down and revived her; then he beat her, whipped her. She had hung herself with her dress. She had fixed it all right, but when they arrested her she didn’t have on anything except a dress and so she didn’t have anything to tie her hands with and she couldn’t make her hands let go of the window ledge. So the jailer heard the noise and ran up there and found Nancy hanging from the window, stark naked, her belly already swelling out a little, like a little balloon.
–From William Faulkner’s “That Evening Sun” (1931).
Laurel says
World leaders will stay out of that chair. No more White House ambush *negotiations.* What a chicken shit way to treat those trying to work with the US. Rubio looked like he trying to disappear into the couch.
Sherry says
“The Proverbial Pot Calling the Kettle Black” . . . 200 foreign donations VS a huge 1,600. . . This from the Associated Press:
WASHINGTON (AP) — When President Donald Trump directed his attorney general last month to investigate online fundraising, he cited concerns that foreigners and fraudsters were using elaborate “schemes“ and “dummy accounts” to funnel illegal contributions to politicians and causes.
Instead of calling for an expansive probe, however, the president identified just one potential target: ActBlue, the Democrats’ online fundraising juggernaut, which has acknowledged receiving over 200 potentially illicit contributions last year from foreign internet addresses.
Trump’s announcement contained a “Glaring Omission” — his political committees also received scores of potentially problematic contributions.
An Associated Press review of donations to Trump over the past five years found 1,600 contributions from donors who live abroad, have close ties to foreign interests or failed to disclose basic information, often making it difficult, if not impossible, to identify them and verify the legality of their donations Among those was $5,000 linked to a derelict building, and $5,000 from a Chinese businessman who listed a La Quinta Inn as his address. Another sizable donation — $1 million — was made by the wife of an African oil and mining magnate.
Sherry says
trump Accepting Even More BRIBES! This from “The Hill”:
President Trump pardoned Paul Walczak, a man who had pleaded “Guilty” to tax crimes, one month after his mother attended a major fundraiser for the president, according to a new report from The New York Times.
The Times reports that a pardon application submitted around Trump’s inauguration cited efforts by Walczak’s mother, Elizabeth Fago, to support Trump and other Republicans — and contended that Fago’s political activity motivated Walczak’s criminal prosecution.
Fago later attended a Mar-a-Lago fundraising dinner with a $1 million cost per person, according to the Times, and Walczak was pardoned less than three weeks later.
Ray W, says
For a time during mid-2021, a number of self-described employers used the FlaglerLive message board to decry their difficulty in hiring low-wage employees, blaming anyone and everyone other than themselves for their woes. Many of their complaints centered on too much unemployment funds that had been extended first during the Trump administration and later during the Biden administration. “Laziness” was their mantra.
I repeatedly pointed out that low-wage employees talk among themselves and they know exactly who are the worst employers, exactly who are the disrespectful employers, exactly who are the exploiting employers. I argued in 2021 that when there are few alternative jobs options, bad employers find a steady stream of low-wage workers, but when the number of posted unfilled job openings is high, increased competition for workers means the worst bosses among us have a harder time filling open positions.
As an aside, in an economy that had never seen a monthly report reflecting unfilled posted job openings of more than 8 million prior to the pandemic, suddenly higher numbers were posted after the pandemic, peaking at as high as 12.2 million posted unfilled job openings, which meant employees had more options and employers faced greater competition for the comparatively few employees that were available.
Now that the monthly number is down to a more normal 7.1 million posted unfilled job openings, employers are once again gaining the upper hand in the labor market.
Explanations at the time of the higher jobs open numbers focused on the fact that some 10 million American female workers had left the workplace after onset of the pandemic, many to care for relatives and other loved ones who had been removed from senior living facilities to protect them from possible pandemic outbreaks, or to care for children who no longer had an open school to attend; these caretakers did not quickly return to the job market when virus fears subsided.
I came across a story this morning, published by Style on Main.
The issue was a rise in the number of restaurant staffs that walk out en masse on their owners.
In 2021, blaming racial mistreatment by ownership, an entire Washington D.C. staff walked out mid-service. In 2023, what was described as a “high-end” NYC restaurant experienced a complete walk-out during Friday “rush”.
The reporter wrote:
“These weren’t random tantrums — they were deliberate pushbacks against systemic problems. Today, similar exits are becoming more common, not less.”
According to the reporter, a more recent event occurred in a smaller town served by a family-operated restaurant of long-standing community popularity. When a “respected” manager asked for more time off to spend with his family, his request was refused. The entire staff walked out with the manager, sans notice, without alleging “abuse” or “harsh conditions”. According to the reporter, the walkout immediately closed the restaurant, and it forced other local restaurateurs to question their business models. Was employee loyalty to be expected, nee demanded, by ownership rather than earned by ownership was a posed question?
The reporter theorized that today’s restaurant worker wants more than just a paycheck; they want respect and stability and an opportunity for growth. According to the reporter, 80% of restaurants today still can’t fill all of their job needs, implying demand for low-wage employees. Ownership that doesn’t offer basic respect and stability and growth may face consequences.
The story resonated with me because when I was 18, almost 19, ownership of the restaurant at which I cooked offered me the opportunity to manage the kitchen of the busy and popular restaurant, complete with a salary of $120 per week, or $6,240 per year.
At the time (1976), minimum wage was, as I recall, $2.35 per hour ($2.25?). I was to supervise 13 other kitchen staff. I thought it was a good deal because I was already the lead cook.
What I soon realized that my normal 40-hour work week became 60 hours or more each week, without overtime pay. Whenever an employee called in sick, my days off disappeared. I hadn’t realized when I made my choice that the federal government allowed unlimited hours of work for managers without overtime pay, so long as their pay exceeded a certain minimum level. Yes, $120 per week exceeded the existing minimum level, but I soon left the restaurant that was exploiting me. That law exists today.
Restaurants can still work managers into the ground and never have to pay overtime no matter the hours worked, provided the management salary does not fall below a pre-set minimum. Former President Obama took a lot of heat from Republicans for signing an executive order raising the minimum salary cap from, as I recall, $23,500 per year to $47,000 per year. Upon taking office in 2017, President Trump soon signed an order rescinding the Obama order.
Make of this what you will.