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Weather: Sunny, with a high near 70. Light north wind increasing to 5 to 10 mph in the morning. Sunday Night: Mostly clear, with a low around 55. North wind 6 to 11 mph, with gusts as high as 20 mph.
- 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]
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.
‘Annie,’ at Limelight Theatre, Limelight Theatre, 11 Old Mission Avenue, St. Augustine. 2 p.m. The beloved musical about the optimistic orphan who captures hearts (and maybe even saves a billionaire). Perfect for families and the holiday spirit. Book here. (Note: all Sunday matinees are sold out, but there is a wait list you may join.)
Rotary’s Fantasy Lights Festival in Palm Coast’s Town Center: Nightly from 6 to 9 p.m. at Palm Coast’s Central Park, with 57 lighted displays you can enjoy with a leisurely stroll around the pond in the park. Admission to Fantasy Lights is free, but donations to support Rotary’s service work are gladly accepted. Holiday music will pipe through the speaker system throughout the park, Santa’s Village, which has several elf houses for the kids to explore, will be open, with Santa’s Merry Train Ride nightly (weather permitting), and Santa will be there every Sunday night until Christmas, plus snow on weekends! On certain nights, live musical performances will be held on the stage.
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 the Bridges United Methodist Fellowship at 205 North Pine Street, Bunnell (through the gate, in room 8), 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: A reference to the Swingle Singers in an early 1960s letter by John Updike (in the newly released Selected Letters of John Updike) triggered memories of my earliest memories in early 1970s or late 1960s Lebanon, when the Swingle Singers took hold of my Mom and wouldn’t let go. She had this one particular 33 LP she’d play over and over, its Bach vocalized with the sensuousness of sirens’ flowery meadows minus the heaps of rotting corpses (a reference, I concede, only one Odyssean reader of this Briefing will catch, but it’s Christmas and I’m allowed the odd personalized gift through my pedantic sentences). The Swingle Singers’ fugues and Badinerie and Ah! vous dirais-je maman and paritas filled, like a half dozen Bobby McFerrins, quite a few parts of our spacious Beirut apartment (seven bedrooms for a year’s rent, as I recall, of what was around $1,000: it was the high life). Naturally, there would have been no Bobby McFerrin without the Swingle Singers. At the time classical music in most forms got on my nerves. Not the Swingles. The unusualness–not to mention that erotic thrill I felt, as pre-pubescent as it was inexplicable, from the voices of those I now know to be , thanks to Wikipedia, Anne Germain, Jeanette Baucomont, Christiane Legrand–of the Swingle Singers caught my ear. Maybe it was an Oedipal thing: I was always in love with my mother, as was half the world I knew back then. Updike in his 1963 letter to Joanna Brown, the ex-wife of the writer Harold Brodkey with whom Updike was having an affair (with Joanna, not Harold), writes her of his own erotic memory of that “lovely moment” in her living room, “watching the snow stream across the brick silhouettes and listening to Bach being beat out, bell-like, by the Dutch jazz singers.” His fantasies, always tending to the Nordic, mistook the Swingle Singers, whose first album had just been released, for Dutch. They were French. They were led by the American jazz musician and Alabaman Ward Swingle (take that, Bull Connor), who started the group in 1962 in Paris, as Connor’s dogs were still mangling the Blacks of Birmingham. That first album Updike was post-coitally listening to, “Jazz Sebastian Bach,” released in this country with the unfortunate title of “Bach’s Greatest Hits” (don’t get me started) won two Grammys that year, what was then just the 6th Grammy Awards. It was the year after Tony Bennett won for “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” a song that still makes me weep though I never had a heart in or for San Francisco (my brother Trotsky aside), when Henry Mancini won for “Days of Wine and Roses” and Bennett won again (“I Wanna Be Around“). The Swingle Singers won for Best New Artist and Best Performance by a Chorus, and were named for a few more (Bill Evans beat Miles Davis that year for Best Instrumental Jazz). They’d end up with five Grammys in their still-going career, if with very new artists. We don’t hear much about them these days. They’re London-based. Why am I choosing Bach’s Badinerie for the video below? Because a) it’s the Christmas season, when the Briefing goes full-fentanyl on Bach, hold the Narcan, b) it was the piece–from Bach’s Orchestral Suite in B Minor–Mom chose for the themes to one of her many radio shows on Radio Liban, c) it would be my national anthem, if I got to choose, and d) I have not abjured my Oedipal tendencies.
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.
January 2026
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
Stetson University Concert Choir in Concert with Orlando Philharmonic
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Stetson University Concert Choir in Concert with Orlando Philharmonic
Al-Anon Family Groups
For the full calendar, go here.
Are you all right? It was such a lovely moment, the many moments all together, somehow furiously pouring together into the seconds while I stood in the center of your elegant and lively room watching the snow stream across the brick silhouettes and listening to Bach being beat out, bell-like, by the Dutch jazz, singers (I think they were Dutch). Thank you. I had to cancel my dental appointment in Boston, because the New York doctor, after talking about Rabbit, Run at some length, kept me there for two hours, while X-rays, blood counts, etc., filtered in around us. The gist is, I have bronchial asthma rather than asthmatoid bronchitis. […] landed at Boston around six-thirty. There were inches of snow in Boston. My rusty trusty old car started, and coming back up Route One too fast I nearly lost control and skidded into a Pizza Palace. But not quite. Mary and the children were well and delighted to see me; I love you but am dismayed by love, yet the taste of you is all sweet. Don’t miss me too much. I don’t know when I will come again; I feel, now, that the rhythm of my life dictates that my nose, which has been too long up in the air, must be put to the grindstone, to earn the graciousness with which the universe has embarrassed me. […] Take care of Temmy, the Maxwells, and yourself, mostly yourself. Kiss, John
–From a John Updike letter to Joanna Brown, Dec. 16, 1963, The Selected Letters of John Updike (2025).
Pogo says
ebullient definition
https://www.google.com/search?q=ebullient+definition
Happy Holidays
And to all, a Happy New Year — Jolly 2026
Laurel says
And who is surprised? Trump and Bondi are giving law and order the middle finger, by releasing what they want, when they want. One document is 119 pages of solid black. They have had the files all this time, were told, by law, to release all the files by December 19th, and here’s what you get, maga: duplicates of documents already previously released, a couple of photos of Clinton, and nada on Trump or other powerful people. Cross bearing Spokesperson Karoline Leavett said that Trump “is the most transparent President in history.” Yeah, we see right through him!
That’s just how much Trump, and his administration, respects you maga. They are protecting the pedophiles.
No mention of Prince Andrew, who was shamefully stripped of his Royal duties; King Charles not waiting or fooling around.
According to AP, 16 files were put up on the government website on Friday, and removed without explanation on Saturday. Screw you, citizens, you don’t need to know. Raped girls, who waited so long they are women now, can continue to wait. Law and Order be damned.
Sherry says
Redact! Redact! Redact! As fast as you can!
Think of it this Maga way. . . since trump (in his warped mind) is the “center of the universe” who is the perpetual “victim”! Why shouldn’t his name and photographs be completely redacted from the epstein files. Besides, unless there is video showing him actually using his enormous “thang” to rape a girl under 14, it’s not rape/pedophilia in Magaworld. Let’s see. . . It’s a:
1. Witch Hunt
2. Hoax
3. Biden’s /Obama’s Fault
4. The Democrats Fault
5. Oh Yes. . . Just “TDS”
6. Consensual Sex
7. The mainstream media making it look bad
8. “Clinton and Others Did It Too”
I think that just about covers all the major Maga excuses.
Those who incessantly say Pedophilia hasn’t been “proven”, while completely ignoring the “fact” that trump has been found “Guilty” of “Sexual Assault” show that they quite possibly have been indoctrinated to the point of no return.
Who could have ever made up this “Twilight Zone”?
Endless dark money says
Guardians of pedophillia (GOP)hard at work. What better way to show they support child rapist than to release hundreds of blacked out pages protecting pedophiles from accountability… the republican pedo klan ! Lock them up and end this domestic terror!