Daily Loaf

Talk about recycling with a purpose: The new Navy Ship, USS New York, came into New York harbor this week sporting more than just 361 crew members – contained in the ship is 7.5 tons of recycled steel from the World Trade Center.

The 25,000 behemoth was built in Virginia and is the length of two football fields. Written on the bow above its crest is written “Never Forget”. Built in Louisiana, it made its way into New York harbor earlier this week, performing a 21-gun salute in front of Ground Zero and docking until November 11 so that the public can climb aboard and get a firsthand glimpse of it.
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Calatrava's vision for a Port Authority transit hub in NYC.

Renowned Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava — the man behind perhaps the most controversial yet-to-be-built building in America — has been commissioned to design the first building on the new Lakeland campus of USF Polytechnic.  With Lakeland’s Florida Southern College already renowned for its unique collection of Frank Lloyd Wrights, the city stands to burnish its unlikely rep as a trove of internationally significant architecture.

Calatrava can only hope that the USF job doesn’t create the headaches he’s encountered in realizing a new NY/NJ Port Authority transportation hub at Ground Zero. His vision won admiration at first for its dramatically wingéd roofline, but has since become mired in the politics of rebuilding the World Trade Center. When the architect unveiled his revised design for the structure earlier this spring,  NY Times architecture critic Nicolai Ourousoff characterized it as a “heart-wrenching” failure, “a monument to the creative ego that celebrates Mr. Calatrava’s engineering prowess but little else.”

USF Poly is hardly as much of a political minefield as post-9/11 New York. But that doesn’t mean the design process is going to be clear sailing for Calatrava’s firm. Funding for the new campus has already raised questions, and we can never understimate the fuck-up potential for any project involving higher education and the Florida legislature. Let’s hope that the end result means architecture fans have yet another reason to make a pilgrimage to Lakeland.

[Editor's Note: Jennifer Huntsman is a US Army Reserve Signal Captain stationed at MacDill Air Force Base with Joint Communication Support Element (JCSE). She has just returned from deployment in Qatar. Jenny writes for The Daily Loaf about life in the military.]

I am home.  I have been back in Tampa for about a week now, but it feels as though I have never left.  Our flight was long and we first arrived in the U.S. through the Baltimore-Maryland International Airport (BWI).  A military flight to Maryland is a humbling experience.  I smelled very bad and I slept on a toy train at BWI’s Observation Deck.  There was a large homecoming at the Tampa International Airport.  Balloons, banners, friends, families, coworkers, even news crews were all waiting for our arrival.  I had so many strangers come up to me to tell me thank you, God Bless, and welcome back home.  When I saw my loved one my heart skipped a beat, I missed him so much.  Coming home is what we’d wished for throughout the whole deployment.

Just a week ago I remember talking with my coworkers of what we were excited about when we arrived back home. Read the rest of this entry »

The Bernie Madoff body count keeps on rising. Earlier reports had named Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick as victims of the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme. Now his client list has been made public, revealing more famous patsies, including Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax and the developer behind the World Trade Center. Read more here.