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Weather: Mostly clear. Lows in the mid 50s. Highs in the mid 70s.
- 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:
Turn back you clocks at 2 a.m. Sunday morning as Daylight Saving Time ends.
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.
The Flagler Beach All Stars hold their monthly beach clean-up starting at 9 a.m. in front of the Flagler Beach pier. All volunteers welcome.
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.
‘The 39 Steps,’ at the Daytona Playhouse, 100 Jessamine Blvd., Daytona Beach. two shows today, at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Box office: (386) 255-2431. Adults, $25, seniors, $24, Youth, $15. Book here. Mix a Hitchcock masterpiece with a juicy spy novel, add a dash of Monty Python and you have The 39 Steps: a fast-paced whodunit, with over 150 zany characters (played by a cast of only four), an onstage plane crash, handcuffs, missing fingers, and some good old-fashioned romance! Content advisory: Fake guns and gunshot sound effects
Thornton Wilder’s ‘Our Town,’ at Limelight Theatre in St. Augustine, 11 Old Mission Avenue, St. Augustine. 7:30 p.m. most days, with matinees on Sundays, at 2 p.m., and on Nov. 15. Thornton Wilder’s timeless masterpiece chat quietly and powerfully explores life, love, and loss in small-town America. A deeply human story that resonates with every audience.
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.
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.
Rewinds: What J.D. Vance called his “amateur sociologist” pages in his fictional memoir known as Hilbilly Elegy drew particular attention, especially this line about people on food assistance, a favorite quote in right-wing indignation circuits: “They’d regularly go through the checkout line speaking on their cell phones. I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off government largesse enjoyed trinkets I only dreamed about.” There’s no attempt at deeper analysis. He complains about a drug-addicted neighbor who buys T-bone steaks. He decides with his Mamaw “to view much of our fellow working class with mistrust” since “a large minority was content to live on the dole.” The reductiveness is as shocking as his analysis of laziness. It’s also what made Vance’s stump screeds so appealing in TV appearances, when viewers and interviewers are not about to look up his fabrications. Here’s the “largesse” Vance is referring to. The average monthly food stamps benefit per household was $162 in 1999, around the time Vance was playing cashier sociologist at Dillman’s (the store closed in 2014). The thriftiest monthly grocery bill for a family of four was $430, so food stamps could cover a little over a third of the bill. (The average benefit in April 2024 was $189 per person, and the average, thriftiest food plan for a family of four was $976). More than half the beneficiaries were children. The 1996 welfare reform law–Temporary Assistance for Needy Families–had cut millions off food stamps. That a cell phone may be more lifeline than luxury doesn’t occur to Vance. Are Medicare and Social Security government largesse, too? Is the Medicare benefit that allows its recipient a gold club membership at a fitness center a trinket? Or maybe those “trinkets” are “no more than manifestations of the poor hind’s pathetic effort to raise himself out of his wallows, to justify and dignify his existence, to escape from the sordid realities that daily confront him,” as H.L. Mencken described the sort of things the poor clung to in 1924. That amateur had the good sense to title his piece “Vulgar Psychology.”
—P.T. (from “Deconstructing J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Fictions“)
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 2026
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Palm Coast Spring Arts Festival
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Second Saturday Plant Sale at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
Caleb Hathaway on Antebellum Flagler: A Palm Coast Historical Society Lecture
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Meeting
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
‘The Curious Savage” at Daytona Playhouse
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
‘The Curious Savage” at Daytona Playhouse
Al-Anon Family Groups
For the full calendar, go here.
The public concern for poverty, which had begun with a few social workers, passionate reformers, and doctrinaire socialists, broadened into a major issue of national policy by the mid-twentieth century. After the Depression of the 1930’s, no President could be elected without a remedial program not merely for the starving and the destitute but for all those Americans who lacked the essentials of an American standard of living. Only a century before, the passionate crusader Dorothea Dix had had trouble awakening a few state legislators to the predicament of “paupers” who, along with the insane, were confined in almshouses and jails. In 1937, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt in his second inaugural address described “one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” he sounded a national alarm; and the nation listened.
–From Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Americans: The Democratic Experience (1973).
Skibum says
So now the pedo protecting president begs the court to “clarify” how he should proceed, saying ‘it would be my honor” to give hungry, food insecure Americans access to SNAP benefits once again if only the court would give him clarity on how to do so. Well, Mr. Idiot, you already know – because you have already made unilateral decisions on which federal agencies closed and which ones stayed open during the government shutdown. You have already decided to allow federal law enforcement, and apparently military members, to receive pay during the shutdown, declaring other federal workers, including TSA and air traffic controllers are not to be paid.
So you already know HOW to do this, apparently, unless it is someone else in the background pulling your strings, kicking your cankles into action. Is it Elon Musk who is really president and you are his puppet??
Folks, do not be deceived! If the above unilateral decisions by the president about which agencies remain open and which ones shutter during a shutdown, who gets paid and who doesn’t, then we all should understand that this latest nonsense about the idiot asking for “clarification” from the court on how to give food benefits that have already been allocated by Congress to hungry families is pure BS… I’ll even spell it out for those maga mush brains who still don’t get it… B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T !!!
Does he EVER do the right thing to help needy Americans get the services they need, and which Congress has already funded and allocated for that use? No of course not, only if forced by the courts to do so because all he is interested in, all he has ever been interested in throughout his entire life is self enrichment and self gratification. Me, me, me… that’s despicable drumph.
Bo Peep says
Dems should just sign the CRA and stop eating the drama.
Skibum says
Bo Peep, one of the primary reasons Mike Johnson and his republi-con house members have been so anxious to have dems give in and agree to their demands before the end of Oct. is, of course, today – Nov. 1st. What is the significance of today’s date, you might ask? Open enrollment begins for all those millions and millions of Americans who have Obamacare. Now, as of today, those Americans can see right in front of their eyes the skyrocketing healthcare cost they will have to pay because of maga republi-con legislation in the big ugly bill that strips the federal ACA healthcare subsidies away from the very Americans who need it most.
Now that republi-cons didn’t get their way and are no longer able to LIE and HIDE the truth about their intentional efforts to make it even more difficult and unaffordable for American families to get coverage, they will have to manufacture even more tall tales than before. Don’t you remember drumph, the speaker of the house, and all those other lying ass republi-cons who stood before TV cameras leading up to present time and assured all of us Americans that their big ugly bill would NEVER, EVER touch Medicare or Medicaid, and those who were covered by the ACA healthcare would have no cuts? That the plain text in their Project 2025 that was the precursor to all of the current healthcare cuts being enacted was NOT the GOP government plan? Do you not have the intellectual capacity to discern when someone is standing directly in front of you and lying their ass off?
The “drama” you are referencing is federal elected democrat reps who DO know when people are lying to Americans, and are standing up to them, standing up FOR you, whether you are democrat, republican, or independent. They are fighting to help Americans not lose their affordable healthcare, so why in the world would you be opposed to that?