To include your event in the Briefing and Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
Weather: Mostly cloudy. Showers and thunderstorms. Highs in the upper 80s. Lows in the lower 70s. Chance of rain 90 percent.
- 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:
Independence Day Events in Flagler Beach and Palm Coast and Evening Fireworks: The day’s festivities begin with the cherished Stars and Stripes parade down A1A in Flagler Beach starting at 9 a.m., presented by the Rotary Club of Flagler Beach. The parade will follow its traditional route from North 6th Street to South 6th Street along A1A in Flagler Beach, within view of the pier about to be demolished and rebuilt (along with that boardwalk). Following the parade, residents and visitors can enjoy the beach (remember that sunscreen) while indulging in the music and entertainment provided by DJ Vern of SURF 97.3 FM at Veterans Park in Flagler Beach. Day-long activities there include including hula hoops, corn hole toss, limbo, and a Kona Ice brain-freeze contest. The highlight of the day will be the Fireworks Over the Runways, hosted at the Flagler Executive Airport off of Fin Way in Palm Coast. The entire community is welcome to attend, with gates opening at 5 p.m. The fireworks display begins at 9:00 p.m. Details here.
First Friday in Flagler Beach, the monthly festival of music, food and leisure, is scheduled for 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. today at Downtown’s Veterans Park, 105 South 2nd Street, from 5 to 9 p.m. The event is overseen by the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency and run by Laverne M. Shank Jr. and Surf 97.3
Notably: It was at Harvard, after all, that Emerson delivered his great “American Scholar” lecture on Aug. 31, 1837, a lecture that did for American literature what Jefferson’s Declaration had done for American politics: it declared independence from the old world. “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,” Emerson wrote. So why, when Harvard marked its 350th anniversary in September 1986, did it invite as its two keynote speakers prince–now king–Charles (John Harvard, whose donation of 300 books founded the school, was an English immigrant), and Ahmed Yamani, at the time ending 25 years as Saudi Arabia’s oil minister, a one-time Harvard student, and the not-too-bright mastermind of the 1973 oil embargo that followed the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, and collapsed within a few weeks. He would be fired immediately after the 1986 speech, in part because of his speech, which took policy positions the Saudi king considered at variance from the kingdom’s. That’s beside the point. Charles could be excused with that distant connection to John Harvard. But Yamani? True, Yamani carried on bromances with every president on his watch and was the darling of the Georgetown set, one of those great hypocrites of Saudi power and presumption (the kind of hypocrisy that lectures at Harvard from near the spot where Emerson lectured while glibly, ruthlessly repressing a nation on a scale comparable only to today’s North Korea and the Taliban in Afghanistan). Yamani had donated money to the school’s Islamic studies program, the program now targeted by the shah of maga. So criticism of Harvard’s 1986 decision is relative. Nothing wrong with a donation to Islamic studies programs–unless you consider the source, and an irony Emerson would have found unscholarly. The 375th was a bit more melodious.
—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.
July 2025
Friday, Jul 04
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Friday, Jul 04
Independence Day Events in Flagler Beach and July 4 Fireworks in Palm Coast
Friday, Jul 04
First Friday Garden Walks at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
Friday, Jul 04
Friday Blue Forum
Flagler County Democratic Party HQ
Friday, Jul 04
First Friday in Flagler Beach
Friday, Jul 04
Free Family Art Night at Ormond Memorial Art Museum and Gardens
Ormond Memorial Art Museum & Gardens
Saturday, Jul 05
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
315 South 7th Street, Flagler Beach
Saturday, Jul 05
Flagler Beach All Stars Beach Clean-Up
Saturday, Jul 05
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Law Office of Scott Spradley
Saturday, Jul 05
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Flagler School District Bus Depot
Saturday, Jul 05
Sunshine and Sandals Social at Cornerstone
Saturday, Jul 05
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
Cinematique of Daytona Beach
No event found!
For the full calendar, go here.
Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See already the tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God, find the earth below not in unison with these,–but are hindered from action by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and turn drudges, or die of disgust, –some of them suicides. What is the remedy? They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to the barriers for the career do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. Patience,–patience;–with the shades of all the good and great for company; and for solace, the perspective of your own infinite life; and for work, the study and the communication of principles, the making those instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit;–not to be reckoned one character;–not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and friends,–please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall of defence and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.
–From Emerson’s “The American Scholar” (1837).
The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.
