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Weather: Mostly sunny. A chance of showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the mid 90s. South winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50 percent. Thursday Night: Mostly cloudy. A chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly in the evening. Lows in the lower 70s. South winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 50 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:
Many government offices are closed today in observance of Juneteenth. Courts are open.
Town of Marineland Commission Meeting, 6 p.m. in the main conference room at the GTMNERR Marineland, 9741 N Oceanshore Boulevard, St. Augustine. See the town’s website here.
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Central Park, from noon to 2 p.m. in Central Park in Town Center, 975 Central Ave. Join Bill Wells, Bob Rupp and other members of the Palm Coast Model Yacht Club, watch them race or join the races with your own model yacht. No dues to join the club, which meets at the pond in Central Park every Thursday.
The Palm Coast Democratic Club holds an “After Dark” Recap Meeting (previous daytime business meeting) at 6 p.m. on the third Thursday of each month to accommodate working Democrats. We will meet at the Flagler Democratic Party Headquarters in City Marketplace, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite C214, Palm Coast. Hope you will join us. This gathering is open to the public at no charge. No advance arrangements are necessary. Call (386) 283-4883 for best directions or (561)-235-2065 for more information.
Notably: It was Library of America Day a few days ago, the postman–who rang twice a couple of weeks ago: he was carrying books from France–bringing the second volume of Wendell Berry’s Port William Novels and Stories: The Postwar Years. I have not gotten as far into Berry yet to know what these Port Williams books are about, but they seem to be his Yoknapatawpha County. Instead of Faulkner’s fictional Mississippi based on the non-fictional Oxford), it’s Berry’s fictional Kentucky. The two novels in the second volume span the years of 1945 to 1978, those 50s, 60s and 70-s the French call les trente glorieuses, as in “the 30 glory years” of the post-war miracle. It wasn’t that much less glorious here, with those decades of equality and opportunity and tax sanity as we haven’t known since Reagan’s election. Berry published The Memory of Old Jack in 1974. The book is set in 1952. It’s an elegy by the protagonist on the last day of his life: “Distressingly few novelists treat both their characters and their readers with the kind of respect that Wendell Berry displays in this deeply moving account of the final day in the long life of a remarkable human being,” went the Times review by James Frakes. “On this vibrant September day in 1952, Jack Beechum, 92 years old, relives in richly textured memory the highlights and dark stretches of his career as tobacco‐farmer, husband, father, lover, crusty mentor, man‐model, and archetypal friend in the small river community of Port William, Ky. While the present bustles around him in disjointed and confusing flashes, the “firm sequence of the past is fleshed out with vivid ritual‐like immediacy: “tracing the way by which he came here, into this final solitude of an old mind shaped and taught by years of which all the other rememberers are dead.” All the other rememberers are dead. When do we begin to see for what it is the solitude we’re left with by the death of those we loved–a bitter salve and encouragement toward the inevitable. Remembering, from 1988, about Andy Cartlett, who’s lost his right hand in a farming accident and ponders a fork in his road. The volume includes two dozen short stories. Even summarizing it here is like smelling something appetizing from afar and hungering for it, though the reading pile is a bit too gargantuan these days, lengthened by an earlier Berry.
—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.
June 2025
Flagler County Drug Court Convenes
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Palm Coast Democratic Club Recap Meeting
Town of Marineland Commission Meeting
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Friday Blue Forum
For the full calendar, go here.
She had the fierce ideological integrity of her ambition. She had the closely ordered calm of her household and her ways. And Jack threatened both with his wildness, his love of ranging in the dark, which she did not feel or understand and so feared. She could not accompany him into the dark. She could not release herself into what she did not know and could not see or foresee. It was not so much that he violated her as that he asked her to violate herself: his rough hand reaching into her bodice, or insinuating itself upon the inside of her thigh, his eye that watched, first gaily and then fearfully, for her response to his hand—they asked her to be broken, to desire what she could not provide, to open herself to a completion of which she would be ever afterward a fragment. And so, though his hand went its way, though he sought the clefts and shelters of her flesh, though he entered her with the awe of a pilgrim, though he drove into her like the taker of a city, though the storm of his desire cast him ashore upon her at last, as meek and strengthless as a child asleep, yet there remained some prize, some vital gift that she withheld. She hid her eyes from him. As much as before their marriage, she remained to him an unknown continent. She offered him no welcome, afforded him no prepared ways. Each time he made his way to her, he came upon her as if by chance, a newcomer, blundering in the dark. He returned each time more fearfully, and at greater expense.
–From Wendell Berry’s Old Jack (1974).
Dennis C Rathsam says
The president sons are making the phone, not the president. More fake news….TRUMPS NOW POLLING OVER 50%!
Jim says
Just a small list….
-Earlier this year, Trump was pushing Tesla cars on the lawn of the White House. That same day, within hours of the White House’s makeover into a Tesla showroom, the New York Times revealed that Musk had decided to invest $100m in political groups working for Trump.
– The gift by the Qatari government of a $400m luxury jetliner to be repurposed as Air Force One. The Pentagon last month accepted possession of the plane, which will be transferred to Trump’s presidential library once he leaves office. (After the US government spends at least $100M to try to convert it.) It also shows Trump’s disdain for the US constitution, given the emoluments clause’s clear prohibition. Presidents are not allowed to accept high-value gifts from foreign governments without congressional consent.
-Trump used the months leading up to November’s election to test-run what has become a theme of his second presidency – pay-to-play. He invited oil executives to Mar-a-Lago and, as the Washington Post revealed, offered them a “deal” in which they would donate $1bn to his campaign and in return he would tear up profit-limiting environmental regulations once he was back in the White House. He kept his promise: on day one of his new administration he discharged a barrage of pro-fossil fuel actions.
– Three months into the administration, Trump’s eldest son, Don Jr, launched an elite private members’ club named Executive Branch which commands a sign-in fee of a cool $500,000. Its attraction? Access to cabinet members and top Trump advisers.
-Not to be outdone by his own son, Trump himself has followed the same playbook at his Mar-a-Lago resort. In March, he began inviting business leaders to dine with him in group settings at $1m a seat. Prefer something more intimate? No problem. One-on-one meetings are also available, yours for $5m.
-The Trump family’s dive into the world of crypto. Shortly before the inauguration, they launched personal lines of meme coins, $Trump and $Melania. Then they issued a new cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar, known as a stablecoin. Taken together the two crypto ventures from the family of a sitting president amount to “one of the worst and most shocking conflicts of interest in our nation’s history”. Trump bragged on the campaign trail that he would turn the US into the “crypto capital of the planet”. Since his election victory, Trump has used his presidential status and executive power to boost not only the general standing of crypto but also his personal stake within it. One of his early executive orders created a “strategic bitcoin reserve” designed to bolster the industry. At the same time, he eviscerated basic regulatory controls, halted federal crypto-related lawsuits and disbanded a taskforce trained to hunt down crypto criminals.
Of course, this isn’t all but you get the point. Never have we had a president(?) who so blatantly ignores all the rules, laws and ethics (he has no idea what that is) and greedily lines his pockets using the power of the US government to keep the “donors” lined up.
I can’t wait to read the defenses that MAGA will write telling me that I’m all wrong and Trump is just being “Trump”.