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Weather: A 50 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms, mainly after 2pm. Mostly sunny, with a high near 94. Heat index values as high as 107. Southwest wind 6 to 9 mph becoming southeast in the afternoon. New rainfall amounts between a tenth and quarter of an inch, except higher amounts possible in thunderstorms. Sunday Night: A 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms before 8pm. Partly cloudy, with a low around 75. Southwest wind 5 to 8 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:
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.
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]
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.
| The Latest Jail Bookings |
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| j-260710 |
| Source: Flagler County Sheriff's Office. Note: the Sheriff's Office redacts or censors the names of migrants arrested under authority of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. The federal agency requires the redactions, according to the Sheriff's Office. |
Notably: “Powerhouse” is one of Eudora Welty’s most famous short stories–an attempt to recreate the energy and rhythms, in words, of Fats Waller. She does a much, much better job of it than Anthony Burgess’s attempt to recreate Mozart’s 40th Symphony in his On Mozart, his 1991 book about Amadeus that I’m afraid told me nothing I could take away about the composer, though Burgess being Burgess, he pulls off the good lines: “In a sense that God can only be defined as God, so the music of Mozart can only be defined as music.” But I was talking about “Powerhouse,” a story of Fats Waller (who goes by Powerhouse) performing in a dull white venue and making up a story about his wife killing herself because the performer in him is an unceasing lightning strike, brightening and electrifying everyone around. At a break he and his band go over to a Black coffee shop where Blacks in town follow him with their ravenous admiration, his fantasies take various turns, and he returns for the second set before the whiter, duller audience. The beauty of the story, which threw me at first (it begins with a romp that for a minute I took to be standard Faulkenarian bigotry: “Powerhouse is playing! He’s here on tour from the city—“Powerhouse and His Keyboard”–“Powerhouse and His Tasmanians’—think of the things he calls himself! There’s no one in the world like him. You can’t tell what he is. “Nigger man”?—he looks more Asiatic, monkey, Jewish, Babylonian, Peruvian, fanatic, devil. He has pale gray eyes, heavy lids, maybe horny like a lizard’s, but big glowing eyes when they’re open…”) is in its cadences and the way Welty so intimately if still superficially captured the musician. “The quality and character of Powerhouse’s musical activity, as
created by Welty’s verbal activity, constitutes the essence of the story,” Thomas H. Getz wrote in a journal essay on the story called “Listening to ‘Powerhouse.'” “Welty’s language expresses her act of listening to Powerhouse and is also her performance of his music-a translation of his medium into hers. “Powerhouse” suggests an important quality of all of Welty’s work: it is dense with gesture. In it art is recognized as a form of human action, and also a form of social interaction. It is best thought of as the performance of the interaction between speaker and listener, in a community or within oneself.” Would today’s humorless illiterate wokesters call this cultural appropriation? Give it, and Fats, a listen.
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.
July 2026
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
In Court: Jermaine Williams Trial
Nar-Anon Family Group
Bunnell City Commission Meeting
For the full calendar, go here.
All the watching Negroes stir in their delight, and to their higher delight he says affectionately, “Listen! Rats in here.”
“That must be the way, boss.”
“Only, naw, Powerhouse, that ain’t true. That sound too bad.”
“Does? I even know who finds her,” cries Powerhouse. “That no-good pussyfooted crooning creeper, that creeper that follow around after me, coming up like weeds behind me, following around after me everything I do and messing around on the trail I leave. Bets my numbers, sings my songs, gets close to my agent like a Betsy-bug; when I going out he just coming in. I got him now! I got my eye on him.”
“Know who he is?”
“Why it’s that old Uranus Knockwood!”
“Ya! Ha!”
“Yeah, and he coming now, he going to find Gypsy. There he is, coming around that corner, and Gypsy kadoodling down, oh-oh, watch out! Ssssst! Plooey! See, there she is in her little old nightgown, and her insides and brains all scattered round.”
A sigh fills the room. [end page 264]
“Hush about her brains. Hush about her insides.”
“Ya! Ha! You talking about her brains and insides—old Uranus Knockwood,” says Powerhouse, “look down and say Jesus! He say, Look here what I’m walking round in!”
They all burst into halloos of laughter. Powerhouse’s face looks like a big hot iron stove.
“Why, he picks her up and carries her off!” he says.
“Ya! Ha!”
“Carries her back around the corner. . . .”
“Oh, Powerhouse!”
“You know him.”
“Uranus Knockwood!”
“Yeahhh!”
“He take our wives when we gone!”
“He come in when we goes out!”
“Uh-huh!”
“He go out when we comes in!”
“Yeahhh!”
“He’s standing behind the door!”
“Old Uranus Knockwood.”
“You know him.”
“Middle-size man.”
“Wears a hat.”
“That’s him.”
Everybody in the room moans with pleasure. The little boy in the fine silver hat opens a paper and divides out a jelly roll among his followers.
And out of the breathless ring somebody moves forward like a slave, leading a great logy Negro with bursting eyes, and says, “This here is Sugar-Stick Thompson, [end page 265] that dove down to the bottom of July Creek and pulled up all those drownded white people fall out of a boat. Last summer, pulled up fourteen.”
“Hello,” says Powerhouse, turning and looking around at them all with his great daring face until they nearly suffocate.
Sugar-Stick, their instrument, cannot speak; he can only look back at the others.
“Can’t even swim. Done it by holding his breath,” says the fellow with the hero.
Powerhouse looks at him seekingly.
“I his half brother,” the fellow puts in.
They step back.
“Gypsy say,” Powerhouse rumbles gently again, looking at them, “ ‘What is the use? I’m gonna jump out far—so far. . . .’ Ssssst—!”
“Don’t, boss, don’t do it agin,” says Little Brother.
“It’s awful,” says the waitress. “I hates that Mr Knockwoods. All that the truth?”
“Want to see the telegram I got from him?” Powerhouse’s hand goes to the vast pocket.
“Now wait, now wait, boss.” They all watch him.
“It must be the real truth,” says the waitress, sucking in her lower lip, her luminous eyes turning sadly, seeking the windows.
“No, babe, it ain’t the truth.” His eyebrows fly up, and he begins to whisper to her out of his vast oven mouth. His hand stays in his pocket. “Truth is something worse, I ain’t said what, yet. It’s something hasn’t come to me, but I ain’t saying it won’t. And when it does, then want me to tell you?” He sniffs all at once, his eyes come open [end page 266] and turn up, almost too far. He is dreamily smiling.
“Don’t, boss, don’t, Powerhouse!”
“Oh!” the waitress screams.
“Go on git out of here!” bellows Powerhouse, taking his hand out of his pocket and clapping after her red dress.
The ring of watchers breaks and falls away.
“Look at that! Intermission is up,” says Powerhouse.
He folds money under a glass, and after they go out, Valentine leans back in and drops a nickel in the nickelodeon behind them, and it lights up and begins to play “The Goona Goo”“The Goona Goo.” The feather dangles still.
–From “Powerhouse,” by Eudora Welty (1941).
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