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Weather: A 50 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms after 2pm. Mostly sunny, with a high near 92. Saturday Night: A 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms before 8pm. Partly cloudy, with a low around 74.
- 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:
Coffee With Commissioner Scott Spradley: He’s back! After a hiatus not of his choosing (that nightmare street construction that’s dragged on and on on South Central, in front of his law office, is to blame) Flagler Beach Commission Chairman Scott Spradley returns for his famous Saturday town hall, his 63rd since his election (63rd!) with coffee and doughnuts at 9 a.m. at his law office at 301 South Central Avenue, Flagler Beach. All subjects, all interested residents or non-residents welcome. The gatherings usually feature a special guest. In this case, FlaglerLive’s usual way of snagging information (which apparently gets on Palm Coast Mayor Norris’s nerves) landed us the Town Hall agenda:
The Saturday Flagler Beach Farmers Market is scheduled for 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at Wickline Park, 315 South 7th Street, featuring prepared food, fruit, vegetables , handmade products and local arts from more than 30 local merchants. The market is hosted by Flagler Strong, a non-profit.
Second Saturday Plant Sale at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park, 6400 North Oceanshore Blvd., Palm Coast, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Flowers, bushes and hard to find plants. The event is sponsored by the Friends of Washington Oaks. Regular entrance fee applies: $4 per vehicle with one person aboard, $5 for vehicles with more than one person.
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Monthly Meeting, 11 a.m. at Cypress Knoll Golf Club, 53 Easthampton Blvd, Palm Coast. A monthly speaker is featured. Lunch is available for $20 in cash, $21 by credit card, but must be ordered in advance. The lunch menu is available on our website. Lunch may be ordered by sending an email to: [email protected].
Peps Art Walk, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. every second and fourth Saturday, Beachfront Grille, 2444 South Oceanshore Boulevard, Flagler Beach. Step into the magical vibes of Unique Handcrafted vendors gathering in one location, selling handmade goods. Makers, crafters, artists, of all kinds found here. From honey to baked goods, wooden surfboards, to painted surfboards, silverware jewelry to clothing, birdbaths to inked glass, beachy furniture to foot fashions, candles to soaps, air fresheners to home decor and SO much more! Peps Art Walk happens on the last Saturday of every month. A grassroots market that began in May of 2022 has grown steadily into an event with over 30 vendors and many loyal patrons. The event is free, food and drink on site, parking is free, and a raffle is held to raise money for local charity Whispering Meadows Ranch. Kid friendly, dog friendly, great music and good vibes. Come out to support our hometown artist community!
Grace Community Food Pantry, 245 Education Way, Bunnell, drive-thru open today from 10 a.m. to 1 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.
Notably: I’ve been reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea again, though the word “again” is a bit–generous? Not the right word. Help me with the mot juste, the right word in this context. I did read it–devoured it, became it–about 48 years ago (the date I handwrote in the book is November 1977, must have been a birthday present) those paradisiacal afternoons in Hamlaya, our Lebanese mountain retreat, during the war. That’s the cover of the book, to the left. My actual book. But does that count anymore? I still have that wonderful Livre de Poche edition. It breaks my heart to hold it, because what I wrote on the inside flap also includes one of my mind-boggling and idiotic codes, “MM,” which I think means that it was a gift from my sweet mother. The book is in near-mint condition even though I read every page: I loathed breaking spines, and at the time I had not yet developed a mania for disfiguring books with my inane and insufferable annotations, which would earn me every firing squad from the Spanish Civil War to Pol Pot’s regime if anyone ever saw them. A decade and a half ago the Pleiade, that eighth wonder of the world, began publishing some of Verne’s works. The Pleiade is what the Library of America modeled itself after. It is France’s way of giving literature the monuments it deserves, but in ways that takes the monuments out of the museum and places them in readers’ hands, in sensual, irresistible ways. The books, uniform and impossibly gorgeous, can turn any illiterate into a zombified reader for 10 hours a day, which is what these things do to me when I hold them. The Pleiade (an imprint of Gallimard, the elite publishing house we can compare to Random House’s Knopf here) has put out five or six volumes or so of Jules Verne, each with two, three or four novels (he wrote about 80). Vingt mille lieues sous les mers appears alongside The Children of Captain Grant. Unlike my old Livre de Poche edition (pocketboook, in English), the Pleiade always gives the reader generous footnotes, introductions, notes on the text, basically a history of the novel in your hands. I find them helpful, and unobtrusive: you want to read them go to the back of the book. You don’t want to, keep reading. Anyway. The other morning I was reading the chapter where Nemo is preparing to take Aronnax on an undersea hunt. Aronnax is disbelieving and absorbed by the wonders of it, as always. Then Nemo tells him about his gun. And there, I realized to my own disbelief, was how the Taser–that electric stun gun cops love so much–was born. Here’s Gutenberg’s translation:
“But it seems to me that in this twilight, and in the midst of this
fluid, which is very dense compared with the atmosphere, shots could
not go far, nor easily prove mortal.”“Sir, on the contrary, with this gun every blow is mortal; and however
lightly the animal is touched, it falls as if struck by a thunderbolt.”“Why?”
“Because the balls sent by this gun are not ordinary balls, but little
cases of glass (invented by Leniebroek, an Austrian chemist), of which
I have a large supply. These glass cases are covered with a case of
steel, and weighted with a pellet of lead; they are real Leyden
bottles, into which the electricity is forced to a very high tension.
With the slightest shock they are discharged, and the animal, however
strong it may be, falls dead. I must tell you that these cases are size
number four, and that the charge for an ordinary gun would be ten.”“I will argue no longer,” I replied, rising from the table; “I have
nothing left me but to take my gun. At all events, I will go where you
go.”
—P.T.
Now this:
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July 2025
Saturday, Jul 12
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
315 South 7th Street, Flagler Beach
Saturday, Jul 12
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Law Office of Scott Spradley
Saturday, Jul 12
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Flagler School District Bus Depot
Saturday, Jul 12
Second Saturday Plant Sale at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
Saturday, Jul 12
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Meeting
Cypress Knoll Golf and Country Club
Saturday, Jul 12
Peps Art Walk Near Beachfront Grille
Sunday, Jul 13
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Presbyterian Church
Sunday, Jul 13
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Flagler School District Bus Depot
Sunday, Jul 13
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Sunday, Jul 13
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area at Flagler Beach
Sunday, Jul 13
Al-Anon Family Groups
No event found!
For the full calendar, go here.
It was just this sort of thinking that lay behind the Democratic-Republicans’ excitement over the undersea warfare inventions of Robert Fulton. Fulton, who spent two decades abroad between 1787 and 1806 mingling with radicals like Thomas Paine and Joel Barlow, became convinced that submarines and torpedoes could revolutionize naval warfare. By being able to destroy warships “by means so new, so secret, and so incalculable,” submarines, said Fulton, would render conventional naval warfare impossible. Not knowing where the underwater attacks would come from, sailors would be demoralized and fleets would be “rendered worthless.” Without navies, nations, in particular Great Britain, would be compelled to liberalize their trade and practice the freedom of the seas that Americans had long advocated. This in turn would lead to the universal and perpetual peace that every enlightened person, but especially Americans, yearned for. Fulton built a prototype of a submarine and called it Nautilus . Although he knew his submarine was but an infant, he saw in it “an Infant hercules which at one grasp will Strangle the Serpents which poison and convulse the American Constitution.”23 Fulton returned to the United States eager to demonstrate his new invention. In 1807 he used one of his torpedoes, which were actually mines, to blow up a brig in New York Harbor, an experiment that Washington Irving’s Salmagundi mocked as the destruction of the British fleet in effigy. Nevertheless, the Republicans were excited. In a Fourth of July address in 1809 his friend and patron Joel Barlow declared that Fulton’s submarine project “carries in itself the eventual destruction of naval tyranny” and the possibility of freeing “mankind from the scourge of naval wars.”24 With this kind of support from a leading Republican intellectual and with the publication of his Torpedo War and Submarine Explosions in 1810, Fulton was invited to address the Congress and to conduct further tests of his underwater devices. The Republican Congress, despite its reputation for penny-pinching, even appropriated five thousand dollars to fund his experiments. Although Fulton had many doubters, especially in the navy and among the Federalists, Jefferson had nothing but praise for his devices. In April 1810 the former president told Fulton that he hoped that “the torpedo may go the whole length you expect of putting down navies.” Indeed, he wished the scheme to succeed “too much not to become an easy convert & to give it all my prayers & interest. . . . That the Tories should be against you is in character, because it will curtail the power of their idol, England.” Although most of Fulton’s torpedo experiments were unsuccessful, the Jeffersonian Republican dream of creating the conditions for a universal peace did not die.”
–From Gordon S. Wood’s Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (2009).
The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.
