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Weather: Partly cloudy with showers and thunderstorms likely. Highs in the mid 90s. Lows in the mid 70s. Chance of rain 60 percent. Heat index values up to 110. Thursday Night: Partly cloudy with a slight chance of showers and thunderstorms. Lows in the mid 70s. Chance of rain 20 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:
In Court: Michael Gilbert returns to court to decide whether and how to plead to his latest probation violation. His choice will decide whether he faces five more years in prison (he has already served nearly 15, as an accomplice of Brandon Washington) or life. The hearing is at 8:30 a.m. before Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols in Courtroom 401 at the Flagler County courthouse.
Drug Court convenes before Circuit Judge Dawn Nichols at 10 a.m. in Courtroom 401 at the Flagler County courthouse, Kim C. Hammond Justice Center 1769 E Moody Blvd, Bldg 1, Bunnell. Drug Court is open to the public. See the Drug Court handbook here and the participation agreement 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 its monthly business meeting at noon at the Flagler Democratic Party Headquarters in City Marketplace, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite C214, Palm Coast. 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. For further information, please contact Palm Coast Democratic Club’s President Donna Harkins at (561) 235-2065, visit our website at http://palmcoastdemocraticclub.org/ or Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/groups/palmcoastdemclub/permalink
Notably: On the balcony on summer evenings my grandfather often asked my grandmother: “What calm and serenity do you hear?” My maternal grandmother, who was hard of hearing by then and unlike my paternal grandma was still resisting a hearing aid, would answer something completely different, inventing something to answer him and not make him feel unheard, unaware that he was asking her whether she heard the unheard, whether she sensed the silence as he did, with a sensualism his piousness wouldn;t dare speak, though he found other ways,m as you can very well see. It was of the mountains of Sannin that my grandfather was speaking, rising almost 10,000 feet past a series of valleys and lesser mountains from the village where we lived, a mere 2,400 feet up. He was a saint, my maternal grandfather. A few days ago my brother sent me the slide above of both of them, an old batch of slides unearthed no differently than archeological digs unearth amphitheaters of Greece and Rome in our Levantine regions, or amphores still full of reimagined memories, reviving a whole world. They were flirty, Geddo Anis and Nonna, as we called my grandparents. She would end up outliving him by a decade in that house he had built. I remember the day he died. I was there. He had been butchered by prostate cancer surgery and was never again able to walk. It was 1977. Someone came into my classroom at the College Mariste de Champville and pulled me out, her arms around me, after having me get my coat. Obviously, something was wrong. You got used to it. My father, who took the picture above, for FlaglerLive of course, had died the previous year. Loss was not alien to us children of Lebanon back then. What’s left of my grandfather but that same serenity in Sannin despite the bedlam of Lebanon all around? Geography like time is relative: there are nights or days when my mind wanders to the look of that mountain as we’d see it from our house, and like the opening strains of a Mozart particular sonata (see below), it’s all it takes to be transported, to see my grandfather walking with his cane outside–he’d go on epic walks–Sannin always having his back. Like the moon that accompanies you wherever you go, Sannin was too high and colossal not to always be in your sights from the smallness of our village. It was our deity. And there I can still go from time to time, temporarily to be sure: we cannot deny–we cannot defeat–the temporal. It defeats us. But there are moments.
—P.T.
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 County Drug Court Convenes
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Town Center
Palm Coast Democratic Club Meeting
Flagler Beach City Commission Meeting
Evenings at Whitney Lecture Series
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Friday Blue Forum
For the full calendar, go here.
The first time I ever went down the Mississippi, I thought the highest bluff on the river between St. Louis and New Orleans — it was near Selma, Missouri — was probably the highest mountain in the world. It is four hundred and thirteen feet high. It still looms in my memory with undiminished grandeur. I can still see the trees and bushes growing smaller and smaller as I followed them up its huge slant with my eye, till they became a feathery fringe on the distant summit.
–From Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad (1869).
Pogo says
@Back here
[T]here seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously-after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important … so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth.
— Robert A. Heinlein
Sherry says
Thank You Pogo! Our lives are now. . . in this trump fascist regime. . . “stranger than fiction”!
Ray W, says
Thank you, Mr. Tristam, for sharing both your thoughts and the intangible intimate interaction of humanity depicted in the photograph of your grandparents.
Some 30 years ago, perhaps more and perhaps less, while visiting the AME church on George Engram Boulevard, I sat in a pew two rows behind a young father on whose shoulder rested the head of an infant child sleeping through the noise and thunder of an evangelical wonder.
Through the singing, the praising, the preaching, the child slept, completely unmoving. Through the chorus, the swaying, the community, the child slept, completely unmoving. For I don’t know how long, as I wasn’t checking the time, the father didn’t flinch a muscle.
I marveled at the privilege of my witnessing of Heaven’s gift of humanity to us all.
Your family photograph brought back to me the fond memory of Heaven’s gift. For that, I again thank you.