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Weather: Partly sunny. A chance of showers with a slight chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. Highs in the mid 70s. Southwest winds 15 to 20 mph with gusts up to 30 mph. Chance of rain 40 percent. Monday Night: Mostly clear. Areas of Areas of frost after midnight. Lows in the mid 30s.
- 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 Flagler County Commission meets at 9 a.m. at the Government Services Building, 1769 E. Moody Boulevard, Building 2, Bunnell. Taco, Flagler County Fire Rescue’s therapy dog, gets an introduction with the County Commission. Former County Commissioner Dave Sullivan is up for an appointment to the Value Adjustment Board, replacing Don “Toby” Tobin. Commissioners are also making several appointments and re-appointments to the county planning board. Commissioners are also voting on whether to uphold a dangerous-dog designation for Luke, owned by an individual on Via Capri in Hammock Dunes. The five county commissioners and their email addresses are listed here. Meetings stream live on the Flagler County YouTube page. Access meeting agendas and materials here.
The Beverly Beach Town Commission meets at 6 p.m. at the meeting hall building behind the Town Hall, 2735 North Oceanshore Boulevard (State Road A1A) in Beverly Beach. See meeting announcements 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: Sometimes we get a song stuck in our head, sometimes a crush, sometimes a gloom, sometimes a place. The sense of place is not among the empire of the senses–touch, sight, hearing, smell, taste. But in a way (to not say in a sense) the sense of place encompasses them all. When we’re somewhere evocative–and often when it’s as simple a place as home–all our senses are aware, though we don’t necessarily have to be in that place to have a sense of it. As the American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan thinks of it, “a culture’s most cherished places are not necessarily visible to the eye.” Nor a person’s. As always my tangent has almost nothing to do with my point. For weeks now I’ve had Baalbek on my mind, a place I hardly know but from a few childhood visits and one fleeting day there as an adult, though it might as well feel, on some days, like a birthplace. It’s the history, the nostalgia, the color, that strange tan paleness of granite. UNESCO’s Heritage Site summation calls it a Phoenician city: I had no idea, although as one of the world’s oldest settlements, it would have been odd had the Phoenicians, a bit bored with the sea, not made it a place of rest and carousing. But before we swoon too much over Phoenician, Hellenistic, Roman and more recent ruins, maybe, as that sense of place beckons, it’s worth remembering that American places like the Grand Canyon and Death valley outstrip even Baalbeck in ancient, ruinous beauty. That the beauty was sculpted more by time than by human hands makes it, if anything, more pure, less tainted by what it took to make it what it is. William O’Dwyer, who had been mayor of New York City, for some inexplicable reason had retired to Mexico City, and there, as he remembered his old city, he said (according to Robert Caro, who quoted him in in The Power Broker): “Lovely, dirty, naughty New York… Oh, that great big New York up there! Thank God, I’ve got those memories… most of the time I can’t get New York out of my head.” So it is with places that tug at what’s left of our ventricles.
—P.T.
Now this:
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 2025
Monday, Jan 06
Flagler County Commission Morning Meeting
Government Services Building
Monday, Jan 06
Beverly Beach Town Commission meeting
Monday, Jan 06
Nar-Anon Family Group
St. Mark by the Sea Lutheran Church
Tuesday, Jan 07
Flagler Beach Library Writers’ Club
315 South 7th Street, Flagler Beach
Tuesday, Jan 07
Flagler Beach Planning and Architectural Review Board
Tuesday, Jan 07
Palm Coast City Council Meeting
Tuesday, Jan 07
Bunnell Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board
Government Services Building
Tuesday, Jan 07
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
Cinematique of Daytona Beach
No event found!
For the full calendar, go here.
Baalbek, rising over the plain of the Bekaa, stands on a site previously dedicated to the Canaanite god Baal. Construction of the city bridged three centuries and the reigns of eight emperors. Best approached from the West when the late afternoon sun plays on all its magnificent colors and shapes, Baalbek bespeaks the Roman presence in the Eastern world. The cobblestone road that emperors traversed is still there, and the triumphant gate to the city stands ruined but unbowed. The orange light of approaching sunset sets ablaze the six remaining columns of the Temple of Jupiter, and shadows soften the mass of what was once the largest temple in the Roman Empire. The remaining walls of the adjacent Temple of Bacchus support massive doorways crowned by heavy stone lintels of a structure larger than the Parthenon in Athens. It was here, before the Lebanese embarked on the road to self-destruction, that modern Lebanon so perfectly blended the East and West. Yearly the Festival of Baalbek offered the best of the two cultures. Umm Kalthum, the most famous Arab singer of modern times, and Lebanon’s own magnificent vocalist Fayrauz rotated performances with such international greats as Dame Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev. And on one unforgettable evening, the velvet voice of Ella Fitzgerald sent the sounds of George Gershwin shimmering off the ruins left by Lebanon’s early Western conquerors.
–From Sandra Mackey’s Lebanon: Death of a Nation (1989).
The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.
