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Weather: Sunny. Much cooler. Less humid with highs in the upper 60s. Northwest winds 10 to 15 mph with gusts up to 25 mph. Monday Night: Clear, cooler with lows in the mid 40s. Northwest winds 5 to 10 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:
The three-member East Flagler Mosquito Control District Board meets at 10 a.m. at District Headquarters, 210 Airport Executive Drive, Palm Coast. Agendas are available here. District staff, commissioners and email addresses are here. The meetings are open to the public.
The Flagler County Commission meets at 5 p.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 E. Moody Boulevard, Building 2, Bunnell. Access meeting agendas and materials here. The five county commissioners and their email addresses are listed here.
Nar-Anon Family Groups offers hope and help for families and friends of addicts through a 12-step program, 6 p.m. at St. Mark by the Sea Lutheran Church, 303 Palm Coast Pkwy NE, Palm Coast, Fellowship Hall Entrance. See the website, www.nar-anon.org, or call (800) 477-6291. Find virtual meetings here.
Notably: Calvados is a French county in Normandy, a creation–like all counties–of the Revolution, the site of Omaha Beach and Colleville-sur-Mer, one of the five beaches (and the bloodiest) where the allies landed. Caen is its largest city, Bayeux its most famous: it is there that you will find the tapestries of Bayeux, the most complete documentary epic of William’s invasion of England in 1066, and a fibrous Rosetta Stone of medieval life. Calvados is also the origin of the greatest drink on earth: Calvados, an apple brandy that can in the right circumstances briefly restore faith in humanity and make you soar like Mont-Saint-Michel which, though not in the Departement du Calvados (it is a few miles to the southwest), is still within spiritual distance. Georges Simenon’s Maigret, that irascible detective, loves his calvados. The Jack Rose, the drink in Hemingway’s Sun Also Rises, is calvados-based. Cheryl and I had the good fortune to have a Calvados on Saint-Michel a dozen years ago, a memory that lingers for us in place of angels. We are always on the hunt, wherever we are in the United States, for a Calvados. No bar we know, no restaurant we know, other than a couple of French dives at Epcot, carry it, though the other day at Total wine we found a few bottles ranging from the $200 to the $20 variety. We took the $20. Pairing it with Mozart, particularly that opening movement of his B-flat major sonata, is enough to glimpse heaven’s antechamber. I now have no doubt why Saint-Michel was built: for a more complete experience with a shot of calvados.
—P.T.
Now this:
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The name calvados is not French, or it wasn’t originally. It derives from El Calvador, a ship of the Spanish Armada, which broke up on the Normandy coast with the loss of all hands. The shore near the wreck took on its name, and some four centuries later, so did the eau de vie, or brandy, made in the region. Apples probably grew in Normandy and Brittany before people came there. The Romans cultivated them and most likely began to distill their Juice. Cider was known to be made there in Charlemagne’s time and has long been the traditional drink of western France. Many Norman and Breton children reach adulthood before they taste wine. The first record of apple brandy being made indicates that a farmer named Gilles de Gouberville distilled cider in 1553 in the village of Mesnil au Val, which is in what is now the Department of the Manche. Actually, it wasn’t until the 19th century that the name calvados came into wide use. The drink itself was mostly the product of a cottage industry until World War I, when Norman and Breton soldiers brought bottles of it back to the front. Later, when thousands of men immigrated from those poor rural areas to Paris and other cities, they took a taste for apple brandy with them. Rough and raw and aged rarely at all, it became the popular working‐class drink, replacing cheap brandy and rum. Besides being a cottage industry, a lot of it also was illegal. A good number of those stills uncovered by the G.I.’s —and probably by some of the Germans who preceded them — had never been seen by any tax officials. During World War II a law was passed giving the Government ownership of all spirits, with the exception of cognac and Armagnac, the production of which had long been controlled by a Government agency. Although this action somewhat curtailed illegal distilling, bootlegging is as time‐honored a tradition in remote Norman farm communities as it is in the backwoods of Georgia.
–From “Getting a Kick Out of Calvados,” by Frank Prial, The New York Times, Oct. 14, 1979.
The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.
