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Weather: A 20 percent chance of showers after 1pm. Mostly cloudy, with a high near 70. Thursday Night: A 20 percent chance of showers. Partly cloudy, with a low around 56.
- 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:
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.
The Flagler Beach City Commission meets at 5:30 p.m. at City Hall, 105 South 2nd Street in Flagler Beach. Watch the meeting at the city’s YouTube channel here. Access meeting agenda and materials here. See a list of commission members and their email addresses here.
The Palm Coast Beautification and Environmental Advisory Committee meets at 5 p.m. at City Hall, 160 Lake Avenue, Palm Coast.
Flagler Beach United Methodist Church Food Pantry: Flagler Beach United Methodist Church‘s food pantry is open today from 9:30 a.m. to noon at 1500 S. Daytona Ave, Flagler Beach. The church’s mission is to provide nourishment and support in a welcoming, respectful environment. To find us, please turn at the corner of 15 Street and S. Daytona Ave, pull into the grass parking area and enter the green door.
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.
Notably: Unaware of it or its method until I read it a few days ago, I was struck by the very pronounced use of dialect in Eugene O’Neill’s “Dreamy Kid,” the 1919 one-act play about a Black grandma on her deathbed and her grandson Dreamy running from the law and seeing her one last time. The language was difficult to understand, and difficult to take: “Dat you, Dreamy?” “Didn’ I heah yo talkin’ jest now, Dreamy?” “Hit can’t be long befo’ de en’. (in a louder tone.) Hit was me talkin’ wid a pusson fum ovah de way.” And so on. I admit: I had to ask Gemini to translate it into Ohio English for me so I could at least read it through otherwise the one act would’ve taken me a Trollope’s worth of reading time. (Edith Wharton had written Sinclair Lewis to advise him to use less slang. “I believe the real art in this respect is to use just enough to colour your dialogue, not so much that in a few years it will be almost incomprehensible.” And I’m not cracking wise when I say that during the newspaper strike of 1962-3, New York Times managing editor Turner Catledge suggested that a James Reston column on Southern Blacks be read over the air on WQXR, the newspaper’s radio station, in Negro dialect. He was told it wouldn’t be a good idea.) O’Neill, I thought to myself, sounds like a writer’s equivalent of blackface. But that’s a silly judgment harsh with presentism. The play was ahead of its time. Featuring an all-Black cast was gutsy in itself. Slang was part of the realism, jarring as it may seem to our modern ears (I am equally jarred by Mark Twain when he goes down that road, or Lewis, or anyone: half the time a writer uses slang just to show off). The themes of “The Dreamy Kid” are stereotypical: the dying Mama, the criminal boy, the imploring sister. But there may have been a freshness then tha’s been lost now. The play made me wonder about the craze, these days, against cultural appropriation, a form of imprisoning artists in modes or methods against their natural inclinations, as if a white artist is never supposed to imagine a Black life (what if a modern-day Flaubert, as white and bourgeois as John Cheever, wanted to write a new Bovary from a Black or Latino’s perspective?) “I hate all that shit when white tell you about black,” goes the Black character in Malamud’s The Tenants (1971), which by today’s standards is all appropriations. Wesley Morris in one of the essays in The 1619 Project tried to make the distinction between appropriation and appreciation: “”It’s in the melismatic hair flips of Ariana Grande. It’s in what we once called “blue-eyed soul,” though I’ve never known what to do with that term, which euphemistically, almost jokingly labels even its most convincing practitioners—the Bee Gees, Michael McDonald, Bobby Caldwell, Hall & Oates, Teena Marie, Annie Lennox, Simply Red, George Michael, Taylor Dayne, Lisa Stansfield, Joss Stone, Robin Thicke—as diet Black music. The term might be out to mock or judge or offset, but it points to a crucial distinction between what’s appreciative and what’s appropriative. Flaws and all, these are non-Black artists committed to Black music, often working alongside Black musicians—which is to say, with Black musicians’ consent.” But even that just about forbids the artist, whatever the artist’s race or creed or sexual orientation may be, to experiment, to appropriate not as an act of cultural taking, but as an act of free expression, at least along the lines of what V.S. Pritchett once wrote in a beautiful essay on Zola’s Germinal, about the coal miners of northern France: “I do not know whether it is a defect of our novels about mining that they are written by ex-miners. Zola, who came from outside, surpasses them, perhaps because what is thoroughly and consciously conquered by force of will is enormously stimulating to invention. The fault of the modern novelist in general is that he does not go outside his own world for his material and I think that the decline of the power to tell a story or of the interest in doing so is due to this. Zola is an example of the value of pure curiosity.” I see no reason why the same idea doesn’t apply to any subject, any culture, any so-called appropriation. After all, what is the immigrant experience but a lifelong exercise in learned appropriation? We once called it assimilation. It had its problems. It was also a source of reinvention.
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.
April 2026
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Flagler County Cultural Council (FC3) Meeting
Friday Blue Forum
“Godspell,” at the Limelight Theatre
“The Sound of Music,” at Athens Theatre
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Democratic Women’s Club
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Chess Meet-Up At the Flagler Beach Public Library
“The Sound of Music,” at Athens Theatre
“Godspell,” at the Limelight Theatre
“The Sound of Music,” at Athens Theatre
Random Acts of Insanity’s Roundup of Standups from Around Central Florida
For the full calendar, go here.
The names! The slang! One wonders if Hemingway had Lewis in mind when he advised his sister in a letter, “All slang goes sour in a short time.” (In a letter to Maxwell Perkins he said, of Lewis, “If I wrote as sloppily and shitily [sic] as that freckled prick I could write five thousand words a day year in and year out.”) In Mark Twain and Ring Lardner, the slang and idiom have the charming music of an exotic tongue preserved by transcription; Lewis uses slang from above, as a protest on behalf of the King’s English. Did men ever greet each other as noisily as Babbitt and Paul Riesling do?
–From John Updike’s More Matter (1999).
Jim says
Let’s all admire DJT and the art of the deal! Only this guy can rattle the sword of USA military might at our NATO allies,threaten to invade an allied country, threaten more ridiculous tariffs on our closest allies, claim he has the right to do this because Norway didn’t give him the Nobel peace prize (8 wars!) and then, in a genius twist suddenly announce that we have a deal(?) with NATO and we’re getting everything we want! When asked if the deal includes the USA takeover of Greenland, our leader hedges. According to dear leader, the deal is very complicated. Details will come out later (much later- like the Epstein files?),
MAGA will claim this Trump the great negotiator in all his glory.
For those in the world of reality, this is seen as TACO TRUMP (Trump Always Chickens Out).
So, the price our country pays for a “great deal” with no details is the further erosion of our standing in the world and our once rock solid allies are moving further away. China and Russia must be proud of our idiot president and in sycophantic administration.
Here are the secret facts of the deal that will come out (I see the future!):
-NATO will put more troops and ships in the Artic
– USA can build more bases (news alert! We already can understand existing agreements
-USA and other countries can mine rare earth minerals there (news alert: we’ve been invited to do that anyway!)
-Trump’s kids can build a miniature golf course there (just threw that in to stay with the ridiculous theme of the Trump show!
– Trump administration will not help Ukraine defend itself against Russia (threw that in because it’s the truth and any American who claims to love democracy shout be ashamed).
So, another miserable day for America and the democratic countries we once could rely on. If this is “winning”, I don’t want to know what losing looks like…
Dennis C Rathsam says
Another great move by our President…. This will ensure the saftey of N America, from Russia or China. Simpley brilliant!
Skibum says
Huh? If that is what YOU call brilliance, I’d be embarrassed if I were you to admit it in public.
YankeeExPat says
Alaska and Russia are separated by the Bering Strait, with the mainland-to-mainland distance being about 55 miles (88 km), but the closest points are the Diomede Islands, only 2.5 miles (4 km) apart, with the International Date Line running between Russia’s Big Diomede and the U.S.’s Little Diomede. During winter, the strait often freezes, creating an ice bridge where one could technically walk from the U.S. to Russia.
“AI Overview”
“Nostrovia” Comrade Denniski!
Pogo says
Laurel says
OMG, he is so stupid, he stood in front of the people of Davos, and said “If it wasn’t for America, you all would be speaking German!” Newsflash, four dimensional chess playing genius: the people of Davos speak German.
What’s the excuse this time? He’s a stand up comedian?
Holy cow!
Skibum says
Drumph never eyed a piece of land without envisioning another one of his slumlord driven apartment highrises blotting the landscape, or maybe another try for a casino that maybe wouldn’t go bankrupt under his low IQ brainiacism. Although, lately, his youngest spermbrainchild has been changing his mind about up-and-coming schemes to take what isn’t theirs for the taking, but take it all anyway. Bitcoin, no longer a no no in drumph’s limited vocabulary. Cyber investment crime possibilities, yeah that too is a GO! Sucking up other nation’s rare earth minerals for personal profit? Absofuckinglutely!
There is no such word as depravity in the convicted felon sex abuser’s pea brain… that is one for sure thing he learned from his daddy. And the other is that… when you’re a STAR in your own mind, you can do anything you want because there are enough suckers out there who will just stand there smiling and saying nothing while you get away with it.
Daddy wasn’t his only teacher. In today’s America, he can just claim the HE is the victim and all of the maga, pseudo “Christians” who are adorned with crosses around their necks and are adherents of the white kristian nationalist cult, will fiercely defend him as if he floated down from maga heaven, prayers answered for a true, WHITE racist version of Jesus who really understands all of the horrible trials and tribulations that white men have suffered for ages in AmeriKa.
Praise the Lord of maga…He lives!
Laurel says
I have mentioned here that I wondered why people would continue to support someone so absurd. Just a little more than a decade ago, Trump would be hooked off the stage, and laughed at. No one would believe or accept him as anything but a fool. Now, there are people who absolutely accept anything, no matter how damaging, no matter how crazy, no matter how destructive he says as gospel. “They’re eating the dogs..” Acceptable. “Quiet piggy.” Acceptable. “I want Greenland.” Acceptable. No need to go forward, y’all have heard it, repeatedly. People continue to state that they don’t like what he says, yet still back him regardless. He could release the Epstein files, giving the abused women (who were children at the time of abuse) some sort of real retribution, but won’t. Still backed.
So, I wrote that do people who continue to back him, with all the facts and evidence against him because they have a limited ability to learn, or because they know better, and, instead, make it a choice? Is part of that choice greed? Is it self motivation?
I have come to the conclusion, that though there are people who are limited in the ability to learn respect for facts and evidence, the major factor of this support is choice. They choose to ignore, and reject evidence and facts, and choose to find acceptance in their tribal relations. Safety in numbers. Confirmation.
A while back, I meditated, if you will, on why we do what we do, and what should we do. The answer I got was “It is the choices you make.” I will add to that, intent. What is your intent? When you make a choice, be honest with yourself, and figure out what your intent is.
Reconsider you choices, and study your intentions.
t.o. Doug says
Every day the national media writes articles about Greenland, or ICE, or his health is another day they aren’t writing g articles about the Epstein files…
Ray W. says
According to a CNBC story, earlier today, the Commerce Department released its November “personal consumption expenditures index” report. In the opinion of many economists, of all the economic reports considered by Fed policymakers, this one carries the most weight.
The result? November’s inflation rose to 2.8%.
Also this morning, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released an updated and final third quarter GDP report, in which the figure set forth in the preliminary report was raised from 4.3% to 4.4% GDP growth.
Said Edward Jones senior economist James McCann to the reporter:
“The consumer continues to drive the U.S. economy, with today’s data pointing to another strong gain in spending. This resilience comes in spite of last year’s slowdown in the labor market, and still elevated inflation, both of which have weighed on real incomes. … Today’s data should reassure the Fed that the economy remains on a solid footing, despite a cooler labor market.”
Make of this what you will.
Me?
Two things.
First, if Mr. McCann is correct in his assessment of the importance of personal spending figures, something that economists have long argued to be important, in that personal spending accounts for as much as 70% of GDP, then it may be correct to argue that our economy remains comparatively healthy, perhaps as comparatively healthy as it was when Trump took off ice a year ago. Whether the US GDP shrinks, holds steady or grows, it can be argued, depends more on personal spending levels than on anything else. This is one of a number of reasons why the Fed places so much emphasis on the jobs market.
If personal spending levels are so important to our economy, is it reasonable to argue that the more laborers in the economy the better? That the more paychecks being issued and then immediately spent the better?
I have been arguing this is so for years.
Second, I don’t know what the Fed will choose to do with lending rates when the seven board members meet with the 12 regional Fed governors next week. These 19 economists and policymakers will discuss among themselves the best economic data currently at their fingertips. Twelve of the nineteen will then vote whether to raise, lower or hold fast on current Fed lending rates.
The current political view of the administration is for the Fed to rapidly and significantly lower rates. Our president has said 1% should be the Fed lending rate.
The current economic view is that lowering rates when inflation is significantly higher than 2% risks igniting more inflation. After all, in 2024, when year-over-year inflation had dropped to 2.3%, the Fed then cut the lending three times by a total of 100 basis points, or 1%. Inflation immediately kicked upwards.
The more gullibly stupid among us blamed the Biden administration for the sudden increase in inflation, but the economists knew that Fed policy decisions drove the inflationary increase.
And every FlaglerLive reader remembers the time when the Fed held the lending rate at an artificially low lending rate of zero for many months after the reopening from the pandemic shutdowns ordered by individual state governors.
Rates on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages dropped to as low as 2.7%. Millions refinanced their homes. Millions more sold their homes and competed among themselves to buy new ones. Homes were selling within days of listing, sometimes within hours.
Home prices skyrocketed as more and more potential buyers crowded into the fray. The market shifted to a seller’s market. Inflation skyrocketed, too, because home prices are part of the inflation puzzle. FlaglerLive commenters still complain of high local home prices. Some are too dense to understand that a big factor, though not the only factor, was too many buyers among too few sellers drove the rising home prices.
The more gullibly stupid among us blamed the Biden administration, but it was homeowners acting in their own perceived selfish best interests that drove, in part, the inflation we saw peaking at 7.1%, year-over-year in 2022. Yes, the Biden administration poured trillions into the economy. Yes, the Trump administration did the same. A perfect inflationary storm fueled by a number of different economic decisions disrupted our economy.
I don’t think it a secret that there is a sickness upon the land. Hatred and vengeance drives human thought. Pestilential partisan members of faction twist the truth. Lying and lie laundering runs rampant. The gullibly stupid among us internalize outright lies and partial truths and then try to spread them. Many of the gullibly stupid have surrendered what was supposed to be a healthy dose of skepticism and formed credulity for the wrong persons, making themselves uneducable.
The only thing to be done is try to provide the best manners of thought available to those still capable of digesting information through the use of intellectual rigor in hopes that reason, described by Jefferson as “Heaven’s greatest gift” to mankind, may perhaps cure the sickness.
Laurel says
There seems to be little interest in finding out truth anymore. I watched a part of the Jack Smith testimony today, and there was little to no interest in getting to the truth. It was all the prosecution of Smith, with showmanship, while stating “this is not a trial.” Very few questions were asked of Smith, other than leading questions, with interruptions when Smith was not heading in the direction desired of the persons asking the questions. Many, many questions had little to nothing to do with Smith’s work on his cases, many were irrelevant, but lots of buzz words and names like “Pelosi” and “Hilary Clinton” brought up. I kept hearing about “political motivation” and “witch hunt,” without any attempt to find any real answers. It was clear it was all a ruse for political points.
It’s a shameful mark on our society, reminiscent of McCarthyism. The truth is the truth, no matter which side of the isle we are on. My Republican husband became quickly disgusted and left the room. Again, these politicians are more interested in their own butts than they are in our country’s honor.