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A most-fitting memorial to 9/11
It's been eight years since the 9/11 attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and killed almost 3,000 innocent prople— enough time for two presidential elections; U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq; the fall of a dictatorship; the battle of New Orleans versus Katrina; the Great Recession; and countless other famous and infamous news-making events. However, none have supplanted the memory of that tragic morning when horrified Americans and our neighbors across the world watched the devastation unfold.
Throughout these eight years, many 9/11 memorials have been suggested. Some have been realized, some scrapped, and some are in development. Perhaps the most fitting to date, the USS New York, steamed into New York harbor Nov. 2 as firefighters, bagpipers, and those who lost loved ones on 9/11 watched. As reported on CNN.com, the new Navy assault ship's bow was fabricated using seven and a half tons of steel recovered from the wreckage of the WTC.
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Just another copycat?
It’s not just hard labor, by the way. It could very well turn into a death sentence.
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Extending a lifeline
Did you watch President Obama's speech before Congress last night? According to CNN.com's Quick Vote, 27 percent of the nearly 140,000 survey respondents didn't watch. I have to confess that I'm one of the 27 percent. As I've said in the past, I prefer to read a speech rather than watch or listen as it's delivered, so that I can tune out the applause and commentators' remarks.
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After the ball
The mind is amazing. Who really knows why it remembers what it does and forgets the rest? This morning, the day after the U.S. presidential election, a song my parents taught my sisters and me when we were children sprang into my mind—totally out of the blue. (We saw a lot of blue and red last night on television, didn’t we? And how about those annoying maps that let even more annoying commentators zoom in to specific counties and compare their results to previous years over and over again? Can we say filler? But I digress.)
The little ditty I learned actually was a parody of the biggest hit of the 1890s—After the Ball. It went like this:
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Tough choices
It's been a rough couple of weeks in the Bell household. While we normally have difficulty finding anything we care to watch among the gazillion stations available on satellite TV, for the past two weeks, we've found ourselves having to choose between watching the political conventions or the U.S. Open.
For me, the Open won out, and here's why. I decided that I would bypass the hype, glitz, placard waving, and pundit analyses associated with the conventions and read the speeches online as they are posted. I'm more interested in substance than packaging, and I really don't care to hear from the talking heads who feel compelled to tell us how we should interpret what we hear. In my opinion, no one is truly objective—including me. I find myself talking back to the commentators and saying, "That's your opinion."
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Commemorating history—Creating a legacy
It's July, and here in the U.S., we're planning our Independence Day, celebrations. July 4 is an important day in our nation's history. On this day in 1776, the Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence and set the 13 colonies on the road to freedom as a sovereign nation.
On the 4th, flags and fireworks will be flying, proud U.S. citizens will line the roads to watch patriotic parades, and backyard grills will be fired up as families gather to celebrate our country's official birthday. And one proud citizen and fabricator, Bob Williams, will take the day off from working on a unique project that commemorates a great chapter in U.S. history—one that began almost 170 years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
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Imagining the new for 2008
Everyone who works at Tampa Sheet Metal Co. has a riverboat to thank. Yes, a riverboat.
During the early 1900s, Augusta Jiretz, looking out the window of her room in a waterfront hotel, saw a riverboat that reminded her of home, Hamburg, Germany. That was enough for Augusta and her husband, John, a journeyman sheet metal mechanic who shortly thereafter set up a two-man sheet metal shop in 1920, the Tampa Sheet Metal Co. In 1938 the company's 12 workers built a facility on what is today Kennedy Blvd., then the outskirts of town; today it's virtually downtown.
"When I first came to work here [in 1956], we did most things by hand," said John L. Jiretz, company president and the founder's grandson. "To set up a punch press took a half hour, and to change a hole size took another 20 minutes."
My how times have changed.
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It's a bird. It's a plane. It's a fabricator.
What caught my ears was the mention of Roland Garros, a French aviator who helped alter the course of modern air warfare. Prior to 1915 fighter planes didn’t provide much fight. Pilots had to use their own pistols, or co-pilots had to work heavy machine guns awkwardly placed behind the pilot or even affixed to the plane’s top wing. Garros realized he needed to be able to fire bullets directly at German planes as he approached them, and he devised a way to shoot bullets forward without tearing apart the ropeller.
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833 Featherstone Rd. 
