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Weather: Mostly sunny. A chance of showers in the morning, then showers and thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the lower 90s. Temperature falling into the mid 80s in the afternoon. Chance of rain 90 percent. Sunday Night: Mostly cloudy with showers and thunderstorms. Lows in the lower 70s. Rainy.
- 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:
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village: The city’s only farmers’ market is open every Sunday from noon to 4 p.m. at European Village, 101 Palm Harbor Pkwy, Palm Coast. With fruit, veggies, other goodies and live music. For Vendor Information email [email protected]
A Freedom Walk is scheduled for 10 a.m. from the St. Joe Walkway trailhead, directly across from the European Village Farmer’s Market, today marking Pride Month’s finale. The event is organized by Flagler 50501. For other related marches in surrounding counties go here.
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students: 9:30 to 10:25 a.m. at Grace Presbyterian Church, 1225 Royal Palms Parkway, Palm Coast. Improve your English skills while studying the Bible. This study is geared toward intermediate and advanced level English Language Learners.
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from noon to 3 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.
Al-Anon Family Groups: Help and hope for families and friends of alcoholics. Meetings are every Sunday at Silver Dollar II Club, Suite 707, 2729 E Moody Blvd., Bunnell, and on zoom. More local meetings available and online too. Call 904-315-0233 or see the list of Flagler, Volusia, Putnam and St. Johns County meetings here.
Notably: during his stay in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) in 1745 Casanova would meet the great Josuff Ali, an urbane philosopher with whom he’d have long conversations about belief, atheism, women, tobacco. Josuf Ali’s description of pipe-smoking is even more beautiful than Flaubert’s who, in a letter to his friend Ernest Chevalier in 1842, when Flaubert was 20, wrote him: “Moderate your ardor for science and always devote yourself to the pipe. It is something for which I nourish an increasingly fervent religion. — There is nothing in the world worth the smoke that flies from it, nor the nerve that garnishes it. It breaks, it is true, but it is replaced; illusions are not the same.” The following year he tells Chevalier: “Ah! Without the pipe life would be arid, without the cigar it would be colorless, without the quid it would be intolerable.” John Updike in Roger’s Version has a few choice lines about it: “The pleasures of a pipe. The tapping, the poking, the twisting, the cleaning, the stuffing, the lighting: those first cheek-hollowing puffs, and the dramatic way the match flame is sucked deep into the tobacco, leaps high in release, and is sucked deep again. And then the mouth-filling perfume, the commanding clouds of smoke. Oddly, I find the facial expressions and mannerisms of other men who smoke pipes stagy, prissy, preening, and offensive. But ever since I, as an unheeded admonition to Esther some years ago, gave up cigarettes, the pipe has been my comfort, my steeplejack’s grab, my handhold on the precipitous cliff of life.” But here’s what Josuff Ali tells Casanova: “The perfection of tobacco is certainly necessary for the pleasure of smoking; but it is not the principal one, for the pleasure that good tobacco gives is only sensual. True pleasures are those that affect only the soul, entirely independent of the senses. Is it not true that you feel satisfied when you put it down only after having completely finished it? You are very pleased when you see that what remains is only ash. Here are two, from which your senses are certainly not apart; but I beg you to guess the third, which is the principal one. It’s a pleasure of the sense of smell: it’s sensual. The principal pleasure of smoking consists in the sight of the smoke. You must never see it coming out of the pipe; but all from the corner of your mouth at just the right intervals, never too frequent. It’s so true that this pleasure is the principal one, that you will nowhere see a blind man enjoying smoking. Try smoking yourself at night in your room without a light, and a moment after lighting your pipe, put it down.” Tow hich Casano tells him: “What you say is quite true; but you will forgive me if I find that several pleasures that interest my senses deserve my preference over those that interest only the soul.” Josuff replies: “I have thought like you for forty years.”
—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
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Pride Month Finale Freedom Walk
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Al-Anon Family Groups
Nar-Anon Family Group
For the full calendar, go here.
As for Simenon himself, he smoked Dunhills and Charatans, among others, and kept racks of pipes on the walls of his offices. He built an affection for Granger tobacco while living in the U.S., and a tin of Royal Yacht is seen on his desk in at least one photo. Simenon wrote a letter about his pipes in 1951, and it was reproduced by Tom Dunn of The Pipe Smoker’s Ephemeris. Part of it is online at the forum Pipe Smoker’s Den (scroll to message number 53, posted by MLC). In that letter, Simeon explains why he always has two pipes, one small and one large, in the same brand and shape: “It is that my wife gives me, each time, the same pipe in the large and small size both. The large one is for the house, the small one to carry around.” In that same post, Simenon explains his preference for Bruyere pipes, “Which does not preclude my smoking occasionally pipes of clay, wild cherry tree and even corncob. Though all the briar comes from France and North Africa, the English buy the best of the stock and, up to now, are the only ones to know how to turn out a perfectly balanced pipe. Neither in France nor in the U.S. has a perfectly balanced pipe been as yet produced. For a long time, Dunhill was the best in the field. They now go in for women’s handbags, painted neckties, etc., and pipes have been pushed into the background. I think that the best pipe, at present, is made by Charatan, in London.”
–From Chuck Stanion’s “A True Pipe Smoker: Georges Simenon,” in Smokingpipes, Oct. 22, 2021.
Dennis C Rathsam says
What a great week in America!!!! Judges cant stop TRUMP, but we all knew that. Just a bunch of knuckel heads with nothing but space between THIER ears! Every lawyer in America knew it wouldn’t pass the smell test! Instead of attacking TRUMP, the jackasses better get moving….Midterms are just around the corner, & their is stil no leader of the party,no one to step up…no one with balls.TRUMP keeps winning, while the democrats telling America that the sky is falling!!!! No one believes any thing the Dems say!!! They speak with forked tongue, time & time again, while TRUMP gets things done!Bidens inflation problems…. GONE, Bidens border problem GONE, Bidens high food prices GONE, Bidens expensive gas…Thats gone TOO! Now it time for Bidens inner circle, to tell the real truth….Wheres all the paper work, that goes with the auto pen,? Who agreed to all these pardons? The next few weeks will tell the sad sad story of the Biden folly in DC! America is demanding answers!!!! MUST SEE TV!
Pogo says
@ And also
“…I had not smoked for three full months, and no words can adequately describe the smoke appetite that was consuming me. I had been a smoker from my ninth year—a private one during the first two years, but a public one after that—that is to say, after my father’s death. I was smoking, and utterly happy….I do not know what the brand of the cigar was. It was probably not choice, or the previous smoker would not have thrown it away so soon…”
— Mark Twain
Hungry kid says
Orange terror strikes again! How long will we allow the treason and terror to continue? The gop cult must be held accountable for their treason and terror!
Sherry says
When I read the Maga cult members saying things like “trump won, just get over it and accept Maga reality”. . . along comes the latest words of wisdom from famed Robert Reich:
Friends,
The hardest part of my nights usually occurs around 3 am when my brain starts obsessing about upsetting things, such as what Trump is doing to America.
I’m sure many of you are like me. Our days are filled with all sorts of distractions, but in the wee hours of the morning, we tend to drift back to big and often terrifying realities.
Last night I couldn’t get out of my head that Trump is intent on abolishing the two branches of the government with the constitutional duty to constrain him.
As every American school kid learns, the U.S. Constitution establishes three branches of government that are supposed to check and balance each other.
Every school kid, that is, except Donald Trump and the people around him who have been usurping congressional authority and going to war against the judiciary.
Trump and his lackeys want there to be only one branch of government — the executive branch, under Trump.
Congress has now all but disappeared because it’s controlled by Republican zombies who will say and do whatever Trump wants.
This leaves the federal judiciary as the only remaining check on Trump. So far, federal courts have paused about 80 of Trump’s executive orders until judges have an opportunity to hear arguments and sift through evidence at full trials.
But even this is too much for the dictator-in-chief.
On Friday, a majority of the Supreme Court — at the prodding of Trump’s Justice Department — decided that federal judges could pause executive actions only for the specific plaintiffs that bring a case. (Previously, any of the nation’s more than 1,000 judges in its 94 district courts could issue nationwide injunctions that immediately halted government policies across all 50 states.)
On Tuesday, Trump and his lackeys filed a lawsuit against 15 federal judges who serve on the bench in Maryland, seeking a court order that would block them from making any ruling that might “interfere” in “the president’s powers to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.”
Beyond these are Trump’s personal attacks against federal judges who rule against him, calling them “monsters” who want America to “go to hell,” and “radical left lunatics” or worse — even demanding their impeachment.
These attacks have incited some Trump followers to threaten the lives of federal judges and their families. Threats have surged in recent months, including bomb threats and swatting incidents.
For Trump and his lackeys, all who push back against what they want to do — including federal judges — are considered the “opposition.” Attorney General Pam Bondi even accuses federal judges of “meddling in our government.”
But the federal judiciary is not an opposing party. It’s an inherent part of the government. Federal court rulings don’t “interfere” in a president’s powers. They determine what those powers are. Federal judges don’t “meddle” in government. They are a vital part of government.
We were supposed to have learned this in school. Apparently Trump and his coterie — including Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court — never learned it. Or now that they’re in power, have erased it from their minds.
If all of this makes you pessimistic, I understand. The immediate future does look bleak.
But please do not become cynical. Don’t lose hope. Don’t give up the fight.
Pessimism is different from cynicism. Pessimists believe an outcome will be bad. But cynics don’t even try for a different outcome because they’ve lost all hope.
Trump and his lackeys want us to be cynical because then we’ll stop fighting. If we stop fighting, they win everything — not just the entire government but our entire society.
It looks dark today, but it will not remain dark. The Caligula on the Potomac is getting nowhere on tariffs. Inflation threatens. The vast majority of Americans oppose his plan to cut Medicaid and give the rich a huge tax cut. His popularity continues to plummet. He is facing mounting opposition from the rest of the world.
Do not succumb to cynicism. We must keep fighting. Too much is at stake. We will prevail.