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Weather: Mostly clear. A chance of showers and thunderstorms. Highs in the mid 90s. Lows in the mid 70s. Chance of rain 50 percent. Heat index values up to 105.
- 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:
Peps Art Walk, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. every second and fourth Saturday, Beachfront Grille, 2444 South Oceanshore Boulevard, Flagler Beach. Step into the magical vibes of Unique Handcrafted vendors gathering in one location, selling handmade goods. Makers, crafters, artists, of all kinds found here. From honey to baked goods, wooden surfboards, to painted surfboards, silverware jewelry to clothing, birdbaths to inked glass, beachy furniture to foot fashions, candles to soaps, air fresheners to home decor and SO much more! Peps Art Walk happens on the last Saturday of every month. A grassroots market that began in May of 2022 has grown steadily into an event with over 30 vendors and many loyal patrons. The event is free, food and drink on site, parking is free, and a raffle is held to raise money for local charity Whispering Meadows Ranch. Kid friendly, dog friendly, great music and good vibes. Come out to support our hometown artist community!
The Saturday Flagler Beach Farmers Market is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at its new location on South 2nd Street, right in front of City Hall, 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.
Coffee With Commissioner Scott Spradley: Flagler Beach Commission Chairman Scott Spradley hosts his weekly informal town hall with coffee and doughnuts at 9 a.m. at his law office at 301 South Central Avenue, Flagler Beach. All subjects, all interested residents or non-residents welcome. The gatherings usually feature a special guest.
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.
Byblos: John Updike wrote The Poorhouse Fair in 1959, a decade before his divorce. He imagines Updike’s own second marriage and how his new wife and stepson would play out in front of his mother. By 1959 he was already a serial and boasting adulterer, his stories sometimes reading like France’s Retif de la Bretonne’s Calendar (“Mon calendrier”), a diary-like chronicle of his marital exasperations on one hand and his sexual exploits on the other. For Updike, his tales were “his special brand of lightly fictionalized, peekaboo autobiography,” as Adam Begley described it in his generous Updike (2014), five years after his subject died of lung cancer. His women are stylized and adjectified to seem less objectified but the veil is transparent. “The Maples” is the calendar of “the decline and fall of a marriage,” as Updike described it in his 1979 introduction to the story collection, as if to suggest that Richard/Updike’s philandering drew legitimacy or succor from the deviance of Roman emperors. “Updike,” Nicholson Baker wrote in his U and I, the admiring and revolted memoir of Baker’s infatuation with Updike (1991), “wrongly took sexual advantage of his irresistible prestige as a young writer to poach on suburban marriages while the husbands were off at work.” Baker calls Updike as he sees him: “Mean? Yes, he is mean.” He’d been especially struck by a passage in “Wife-Wooing,” a story not just mean but cruel. Richard Maple fails to win his exhausted wife’s sexual favors one night in the seventh year of their three-child marriage. There’s misogyny (“Courting a wife takes tenfold the strength of winning an ignorant girl”), juvenile jealousy (“You love the baby more than me”) and cynicism hooked to the crudest pun, double-barreled just in case you miss it the first time (“You are asleep. Oh, cunning trick, cunning”). The cruelty is still ahead: “In the morning, to my relief, you are ugly. Monday’s wan breakfast light bleaches you blotchily, drains the goodness from your thickness, makes the bathrobe a limp stained tube flapping disconsolately, exposing sallow décolletage. The skin between your breasts a sad yellow. I feast with the coffee on your drabness, every wrinkle and sickly tint a relief and a revenge. The children yammer. The toaster sticks. Seven years have worn this woman.” The description struck Baker as “inexcusably brutal.” He found unimaginable the sadness of Updike’s “real, non-fictional wife reading that paragraph.” Updike did not relent. In Rabbit Is Rich, when Rabbit is into the third decade of his dark-age marriage to Janice, he reduces her to mere game: “Her waist is thicker, has less of a dip, as she grows into that barrel body of women in late middle age, their legs getting skinny, their arms getting loose like cooked chicken coming off the bone.” In Toward the End of Time, toward the end of Updike’s career, he gave us this: “The earth is like a nude woman flash-bulbed in her bathroom at an awkward transitional moment of her toilette. Despite her wrinkled ugliness, we lust for her.” Updike never heeded John Lennox’s advice to Stephen Baxter in Henry James’s “Story of a Masterpiece”: “… you can be real without being brutal—without attempting, as one may say, to be actual.” Ugliness has the fascination and attraction of an abyss for men, who don’t tire of describing it. You find Voltaire describing Ninon de Lenclos, the octogenarian benefactress of his youth, in terms that anticipated Updike’s in “Wife-Wooing.” De Lenclos “had on the bones nothing but yellow skin trending to black.” Casanova in his memoirs tells of an encounter with an older woman who “showed half of her flabby breasts, which were disgusting precisely because it showed what they could have been.” (In the original French: “Elle laissait voir la moitié de sa flasque gorge, qui dégoûtait précisément parce qu’elle montrait ce qu’elle avait pu être.”) Let’s not get started with Dostoevsky, who outdoes Upike in demeaning women’s looks. He had a thing about comparing ugly women to chicken, too. You recall his early description of the old woman Raskolnikov ends up hatcheting to death: “Her colourless, somewhat grizzled hair was thickly smeared with oil, and she wore no kerchief over it. Round her thin long neck, which looked like a hen’s leg, was knotted some sort of flannel rag…” (I like my French translation better, “son cou long et décharné comme une patte de poule,” which Google translates to “her long and emaciated neck like a chicken’s leg.”) Dostoevsky believed that all women turn ugly because they give all their beauty to their lover (“their beauty quickly passes to their beloved”). After all this, we need a little beauty.
—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.
August 2025
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Democratic Women’s Club
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Random Acts of Insanity’s Roundup of Standups from Around Central Florida
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Al-Anon Family Groups
For the full calendar, go here.
Human imagination never conceived hobgoblin or witch more ugly than she. You could count all her ribs through the wrinkles of the leathery skin that covered them. Her withered face more resembled an old skull than the countenance of a living being, even to the hollow, darkened sockets, at the bottom of which glittered her little black eyes. Her arms had dwindled away into nothing but whipcord and wire. Her hair, half black, half gray, hung in total neglect nearly to the ground, and her sole garment consisted of the remnant of a discarded buffalo robe tied round her waist with a string of hide. Yet the old squaw’s meager anatomy was wonderfully strong.”
–From Francis Parkman’s The Oregon Trail (1849).
Jim says
Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian plant. She uses Russian talking points and propaganda to accuse a former president of treason. If you take the time to review what she says with the facts, you’ll conclude she is cherry-picking “facts” to support a false conclusion.
She is incompetent. She will ultimately damage our intelligence services to where there will be horrible consequences for the USA.
Meanwhile, MAGA swallows her BS like it’s candy.
And that’s another symptom of why our country is devolving into a third world state – dictator and all.
Dennis C Rathsam says
It certainly was a bad week for what’s left of the Democratic party! TRUMPS tarifis are bringing in money, the economy is blooming! The borders closed, & it didn’t take a act of Congress….It took a man with balls! Poor Obama, riding high on his scandal free administration…that just blew up in his face. WOW how many more hits can the Jackass party take? Will they servive, all the up & coming scandals? How long can they plead the 5th, before, the truth comes out. You all know , lose lips sink ships…. I gotta laugh when they say the did nothing wrong, yet they lawyered up real fast. Innocents, does not need very expensive mouth pieces,do they? For the good of the country, we must get to the bottom of all these accusations, & punish those who really are TRAITORS! RIP HULK HOGAN, a man who loved his country!
Laurel says
I have believed, for close to two years now, that Gabbard is one of the most dangerous people in the Republican Party. I wouldn’t trust her to take out the garbage.
Pogo says
@Exhaulting gossip
… by styling it criticism — surely time is more valuable than that. Maybe not; sad.
Mr. Jones: is it really coincidence that Tulsi is a clone of Natasha — and where was Boris?
Sherry says
Joyce Vance has created a “Civil Discourse” book club:
We have a book: George Orwell’s 1984.
It’s the obvious book choice—it has been staring me in the face the whole time, and many of you suggested it. I even touched on it last night when I wrote about Trump’s effort to rewrite history. It’s an important book without being ponderous, the perfect beach read for serious times. And, full disclosure, I write about it a bit in my forthcoming book, so it’s been top of mind (and bookshelf) for months.
Why this book? It’s an illuminating look at the risks of succumbing to fascism. And so much more. It underscores the vital role of open, truthful dialogues, like the ones we have here and take out into our communities. It’s about the protection of democratic institutions against the corrosive effects of misinformation and attempts to rewrite history. I’ve read it with my classes on and off, and we always benefit from it. If you’ve been around awhile, you know we’ve discussed it here more than once.
But I’ll share what pushed me over the edge to choose 1984. There are so many great choices in the comments that I’d be excited to read with you. I stopped counting when I hit 37 and ordered half a dozen I hadn’t heard of or didn’t own already. But I knew it was going to be 1984 when I saw this:
A bias monitor. Accepted by a major news network. Not a huge public outcry as Trump brings the thought police of fiction into fact. We are overdue to read, or reread, 1984.
George Orwell: “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
In July of 2024, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that spawned Project 2025, and one of that document’s chief architects, said on Steve Bannon’s podcast, “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” What happened after that stunning pronouncement? Trump disclaimed all knowledge of Project 2025. And most people moved on. But not us. Four months later, Americans returned Donald Trump to office, and now we’re living under Project 2025. There are a lot of parallels to 1984.
This morning, the deputy director of the FBI let loose with a tweet suggesting he knows things you don’t. (This is not surprising. One would hope the deputy director would be a dab hand at keeping secrets.) But it’s the dark brooding vibe here, insinuating that there’s more. So much more. Pick your adventure. Give gas to your favorite conspiracy theory. Dan Bongino just wants to stay on the right side of all of the inflamed MAGA supporters who are pissed off about the Epstein files.
More to come as we read(reread) 1984 together. . .
Ed P says
Jim,
“ Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian plant. “
And 9 likes…..
Enough said.
Laurel says
I don’t know if Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian plant or not, but do tell us about her claims of Obama being treasonous.
It doesn’t surprise me, one bit, that she would go there, but it should. However, she has the body language of someone inflicted with psychopathy. Cool as a cucumber, unless it’s not going her way.
Every bit of my Spidey Sense says “stay away!”
I almost feel sorry for Rubio, he knows he f’d up, but can’t go back. He looks like the soul is sold, but can’t produce a refund. Gabbard has no such concern. Republicans seem unable to read body language, and instead, make excuses for these people.
Oh well, love and learn. You have many classes ahead of you.
Laurel says
“Live and learn”. There’s no “love” in the Trump administration.