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Weather: Cloudy. Showers likely with a slight chance of thunderstorms in the morning, then a chance of showers with a slight chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. Some thunderstorms may produce heavy rainfall in the morning. Highs in the lower 70s. Temperature falling into the lower 60s in the afternoon. South winds 15 to 20 mph, becoming west in the afternoon. Gusts up to 35 mph. Chance of rain 70 percent. Sunday Night: Mostly cloudy in the evening, then becoming partly cloudy. Cooler. Less humid with lows in the upper 40s. West winds 15 to 20 mph with gusts up to 30 mph. See the daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
Today at a Glance:
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village: The city’s only farmers’ market is open today for its second night of the Holiday Night market, from 4 to 9 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]
Christmas Services: At Palm Coast United Methodist Church, 5200 Belle Terre Parkway, Palm Coast, A Message of Joy @ 8 & 9:30 a.m.
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 55 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 1 to 4 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 Silver Dollar II Club, Suite 707, 2729 E Moody Blvd., Bunnell, 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.
In Coming Days:
Dec. 23: Culmination of toy drive for Toys for Tots at AW Custom Kitchens, European Village, starting at 11 a.m. A drawing for all eligible participants will take place at 2 p.m. Anyone who will have donated toys for the drive will have a chance to win various items, including a 65-inch 4K Smart TV, an Apple iPad, a pair of Apple Air Pods, and gift cards from the co-sponsors of the event. Fifty such cards have been donated. With proof of a voucher, donors also will receive a free hot dog, a free drink, a free popcorn, a free cotton candy, and a free snow cone. There will be a variety of fun things to do such as a bouncy house for children in thanks to the community for its generosity. See details here.
Heritage Site: Macquarie Island is halfway between Australia and Antarctica. It is known for its penguin colonies and for its rock: “it is only place on earth where rocks from the earth’s mantle (6 kilometres below the ocean floor) are being actively exposed above sea level,” UNESCO tells us. “These unique exposures include excellent examples of pillow basalts and other extrusive rocks. Second, its remote and windswept landscape of steep escarpments, lakes, and dramatic changes in vegetation provides an outstanding spectacle of wild, natural beauty complemented by vast congregations of wildlife including penguins and seals.” It is also the island of a cat massacre–not Robert Darnton’s Great Cat Massacre, that very good book about the cultural and social ferments of pre-revolutionary eighteenth century France (where apprentice printers conducted ritual cat massacres that Darnton investigated in a semi-anthropological inquiry), but a more recent actual massacre intended as a benefit to the island’s ecology. It did not work out that way. From The Times in 2009: “In 1985, Australian scientists kicked off an ambitious plan: to kill off non-native cats that had been prowling the island’s slopes since the early 19th century. The program began out of apparent necessity: the cats were preying on native burrowing birds. Twenty-four years later, a team of scientists from the Australian Antarctic Division and the University of Tasmania reports that the cat removal unexpectedly wreaked havoc on the island ecosystem. With the cats gone, the island’s rabbits (also non-native) began to breed out of control, ravaging native plants and sending ripple effects throughout the ecosystem.” Moral of the story: don’t kill cats.
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—P.T.
Now this:
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Gleefully Jerome and Léveille set to work, aided by the journeymen. Armed with broom handles, bars of the press, and other tools of their trade, they went after every cat they could find, beginning with la grise. Léveille smashed its spine with an iron bar and Jerome finished it off. Then they stashed it in a gutter while the journeymen drove the other cats across the rooftops, bludgeoning everyone within reach and trapping those who tried to escape in strategically placed sacks. They dumped sackloads of half-dead cats in the courtyard. Then the entire workshop gathered round and staged a mock trial, complete with guards, a confessor, and a public executioner. After pronouncing the animals guilty and administering last rites, they strung them up on an improvised gallows. Roused by gales of laughter, the mistress arrived. She let out a shriek as soon as she saw a bloody cat dangling from a noose. Then she realized it might be la grise. Certainly not, the men assured her: they had too much respect for the house to do such a thing. At this point the master appeared. He flew into a rage at the general stoppage of work, though his wife tried to explain that they were threatened by a more serious kind of insubordination. Then master and mistress withdrew, leaving the men delirious with “joy,” “disorder,” and “laughter.” […] The whole episode, cat massacre compounded by copies, stood out as the most hilarious experience in Jerome’s entire career. Yet it strikes the modern reader as unfunny, if not downright repulsive. Where is the humor in a group of grown men bleating like goats and banging with their tools while an adolescent reenacts the ritual slaughter of a defenseless animal? Our own inability to get the joke is an indication of the distance that separates us from the workers of preindustrial Europe. The perception of that distance may serve as the starting point of an investigation, for anthropologists have found that the best points of entry in an a. tempt to penetrate an alien culture can be those where it seems to be most opaque. When you realize that you are not getting some. thing-a joke, a proverb, a ceremony -that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it. By getting the joke of the great cat massacre, it may be possible to “get” a basic ingredient of artisanal culture under the Old Regime.
–From Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (1984).
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