Sep 9 2023 - More Prison News

 

Here's another "who would have guessed this headline?" Yesterday's escaped murderer holding out in Longwood Gardens is still at large, and the Mushroom Festival - Kennet Square is known for its Portobello Mushroom crop, is set to begin.  There are 400 officers in the search team along with multiple helicopters. Because I searched for the escaped prisoner topic, this promo popped up yesterday.   It is for Kingston Penitentiary.  This seems to me to be  surreal - here's the promo: Pumpkinferno at Kingston Pen "Canada’s oldest penitentiary and popular historical site is about to glow in the dark this Halloween season. How, you may ask? Pumpkinferno is taking over Kingston Pen for the first time ever and showcasing the most elaborate, creative, and spook-tacular glowing pumpkin creations. Here’s what to know. Pumpkinferno at Kingston Pen after dark is new for the site and is sure to round up eager attendees for what’s to be an exciting fall event. You’ll surely find yourself mesmerized “as the historic site is transformed into an enchanted wonderland of glowing pumpkins,” according to Kingston Pen Tours. Guests of all ages are welcome to explore the Jack-O-Lantern exhibit and take pictures of the sculptures." Having been on a tour of the Kingston Pen, it remains a haunting experience for me.  I can't imagine it transforming into frolic fun after-dark.   Here's a picture from our tour a few years ago. There's a wall that I can't imagine being scaled in a crab walk.  But who knows?   We didn't get to Durango or Santa Fe on our Denver trip.   I found this image from the last visit in 2017 - the beautiful white aspen trunks cascade down the mountainside and reflect in the lake below.

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No Longer Cursive

Cursive is the term we used for writing script or longhand. There's formal and casual cursive.  There's looped, italic and connected.  Everything we know about cursive, though, is not very important - it has left the curriculum of today's school classrooms as we really aren't writing much anymore. What other skills are no longer needed? reading paper maps writing cheques and balancing a cheque book telephone etiquette sewing  ironing Add these to the list: long division or any arithmetic metric conversions finding true north clipping coupons remembering .... e.g. phone numbers I asked the all-important question: What are the replacement skills that we need to learn now? Here's one list I found: expert data analysis advanced social selling mobile expertise multi-platform UX (UX is user experience) design network and information security creative thinking It is the last one that worries me.  It is not in the same class as clipping coupons. I am warned that the fourth industrial revolution is here next year - in 2020 - bringing advanced robotics and autonomous transport, artificial intelligence and machine learning, advanced materials, biotechnology and genomics.  What will we need for these areas? And then I also wonder: what skills will seem like clipping coupons in 2030? Today's pictures are of the Kingston waterfront sculpture named "Time" - created by Kosso Eloul in 1973 to celebrate Kingston's Tercentenary.  There was so much driving rain though - you can see the spots on the lens.  There are too many to photoshop them away.

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The Great Escape - Number 1!

Isn't the most interesting part of a prison tour finding out about the famous prison escapes? The top ten prison escapes of all time, are written up by oxfordcastleandprison.co.uk.  They are each a lengthy story, so I've included the top 3 from the article:   3. Ronnie Biggs Ronald Arthur Biggs, more commonly known as Ronnie Biggs, is infamous for his role in the Great Train Robbery of 1963, and for his 36 years living as a fugitive until his voluntary ‘surrender’ in 2001. Initially captured and sent to prison for his part in the Great Train Robbery, Biggs only served 19 months of his prison sentence before escaping from Wandsworth Prison on 8 July 1965 by scaling a wall with a rope ladder and dropping on to a waiting van. He fled to Brussels via boat and then onto Paris where he acquired a new identity and underwent plastic surgery. His 36 years on the run were spent predominantly in Australia and Brazil. On 7 May 2001, Ronnie voluntarily returned to the UK and was immediately arrested and imprisoned. He served 8 years in jail before being released on compassionate grounds in 2009. He died in December 2013. 2. Maze Prison HM Prison Maze was the location of the biggest prison escape in British history, when on 25 September 1983, 38 IRA prisoners smashed their way out of the maximum security prison, widely considered to be one of the most escape-proof prisons in Europe. Fifteen foot fences and Eighteen foot thick concrete walls topped with barbed wire encircled H-Block, and solid steel doors barred all exits from the prison complex. Prisoners planned the escape over several months. Two accomplices, Bobby Storey and Gerry Kelly, started work as orderlies to identify weaknesses in the system and six handguns were smuggled into the prison by exploiting these downfalls. Just after 2.30pm, prisoners seized control by simultaneously taking the prison officers hostage, and hijacking a lorry which was delivering food to the block. Officers in the gatehouse were also taken hostage and after several attempts, the main gate was opened. Abandoning the lorry after a makeshift road block was set up by two cars just outside the prison, the prisoners escaped over a fence. The prison was made secure by 4.18pm minus 38 prisoners. Twenty prison officers were injured and one died after suffering a heart attack during the escape. 1. The Great Escape Devised by Squadron Leader Roger Bushell in the Spring of 1943, the ‘Great Escape’ from prisoner of war camp Stalag Luft III occurred on the night of 24 March 1944. Bushell was in command of the Escape Committee in the North compound, where the British airmen were housed. His ‘Great Escape’ plan involved the building of three “bloody deep, bloody long tunnels” underneath the camp fences. The tunnels were nicknamed Tom, Dick and Harry. If one of the tunnels was discovered by the Germans, it was presumed that they would never suspect two more might be underway. More than 600 prisoners were involved in the tunnels’ construction, with Bushell aiming to get 200 prisoners to freedom. The tunnels descended 30 feet below the surface and were only 2 foot square. The walls were shored up with pieces of wood which were mainly scavenged from the prisoners’ beds. The prisoners were very inventive with their scavenged items. Tin cans became scoops and candle holders; candles were fashioned from the fat off the top of soup served in the camp whilst wicks were created from old clothing. The sand dug out of the tunnels was discreetly scattered while the prisoners walked around the camp. The 200 potential escapees were divided into two groups. The first group of 100, called “serial offenders”, were guaranteed a place and included prisoners who spoke German well or had a history of escapes. 70 of the men were chosen because they were considered to have contributed most to the tunnels. The second group was chosen by drawing lots. On Friday 24 March, the escape attempt began. At 10.30pm, the first man out emerged and discovered the tunnel had come up short. Rather than reaching into a nearby forest, the tunnel came out just short of the tree line and perilously close to a guard tower. Even so, 76 men crawled through the tunnel to freedom before the 77th was spotted by the guards at 4.55am on 25th March. Of 76 initial escapees, 73 were recaptured. Hitler order half of the escapees to be executed as an example. In keeping with the topic, here are more scenes from the interesting architecture of Kingston Penitentiary.

Going to Prison

Prison is unknown to the significant proportion of the population.  There are just over 40,000 adult offenders in prisoning  Canada.  That is 139 per 100,000 population. Would that be 1.39 percent?  Still, 40,000 people in prison is a town's worth. We are very curious about prisons even though we aren't likely to ever experience one.  But we did get to experience one vicariously this week. We visited friends in Kingston and had the tourist experience of the Kingston Penitentiary "Museum" (no longer a prison).   This was a tour of the historic architecture and the internal organization and logistics of a prison facility.  It has a long history - constructed in 1833-34.  It closed in 2013. So this explains how we got to tour through it.  Wikipedia's entry is the basic structure of the tour - when it was constructed, what the buildings' purposes were and all the facilities in them, what riots were there, famous escapes, and notable inmates.  We got the abbreviated notable inmates - no living persons (the privacy act protects them), and gruesome murderers were omitted. It was fascinating - yet it seemed like we were intruding on ghosts of the past.  Here are a few pictures of the limestone buildings, and a cell block. Here's the wikipedia entry HERE.

Pi in the Face

Would you like a full year of fun holidays, silly and funny days? Today is International Sloth Day.  Sunday October 22nd is Caps Lock Day. There are many  sites claiming to have funny days - for example, daysoftheyear.com says that today is Information Overload Day. Most of the sites have today as Brandied Fruit Day. I wanted to find a really "Special" Day  and Huffington Post delivered on this: "That's the case with Pi Day, which commemorates the mathematical constant 3.14 (ad infinitum) on March 14 (3/14). Pi Day was inaugurated in 1988 by Larry Shaw at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, where he worked as a physicist before his retirement. "Larry has a wonderful, quirky sense, and he realized that March 14 was 3/14, and we could celebrate the transcendental number pi," says Ron Hipschman, an educator at Exploratorium. "Then his daughter realized it was also Einstein's birthday." Pi, which expresses the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle, is an irrational number approximated by Archimedes and other mathematicians going back more than two thousand years ago. For scientists of all stripes who deal with formulas, pi has an almost magical power. It has an infinite number of digits that never repeat in any kind of pattern. Computer calculations so far have taken it out to about 30 trillion digits and counting. "The normal way we celebrate Pi Day is we do all kinds of pi- and circular-related events at the Exploratorium," says Hipschman, who helps co-ordinate the day's activities. Over the years, those events have included pizza-pie tossing contests, pie fights and pi digit memorization recitals, as in 3.14159 ... and onwards. A Pi Shrine was built at the top of a cylindrical building on the grounds of the interactive science museum and a brass plaque was installed honouring the number. "At 1:59, we have a pi procession where everybody carries a digital pi on a pie plate attached to a beater stick through the Exploratorium, up to the Pi Shrine, where we circumambulate the Pi Shrine 3.14 times while singing 'Happy Birthday' to Albert Einstein," he says. "And then we eat pie!" These two buildings are from a visit to Kingston last August.

This Old House

We return to the scene of the sagging barn/shed.  I thought I'd show you the story from all of its angles.  The road view is what you see in the first two pictures. The surprise back is the third picture.  Then we met the second urprise of the old car.  Every old car has a story, so there's an abstract grunge photo to complete our trip around this old house. Today is the last day we can declare  "Until the end of August".  Other than that there doesn't seem to be a lot of significance to the last day of August.  It is tomorrow that has significance!

It is Cooke's Fine Foods for me, please

It is time to think of "Christmas Shopping" and Cooke's Fine Foods in Kingston, ON would be the perfect place to be.  Its old-world charm is just the thing for the nostalgia that Christmas bestows on us. You can find out more about them  at Cooke's Fine Foods "In 1865 the doors to the "Italian Warehouse" first opened. The floors and counters brand new, the tin ceiling fresh and untouched by electric lights. Fashioned after a store somewhere in England, the name meant that only the finest of foods and wines and liquors were carried there. Today we still walk on the same floors, use the same counter and the tin ceiling has had a few coats of paint. Walking into Cooke's takes you back to a kinder, gentler time. Antiques and collectibles sit proudly at the top of shelves, cranberry glass lights hang amongst the electric ones, the floor creaks beneath your feet, and service is the order of the day." Doesn't that set the perfect mood for Christmas of times gone by!

What is a Castle for?

When we think of castles, we mostly think of Europe - France, Germany, and England where palaces, fortresses and monasteries were 'fortified'  to keep out invaders and intruders over hundreds and thousands of years. Kingston's best known castle is the Bodlt Castle.  It is in the 1000 Islands. I snapped this castle as we drove by it.  It is the Collins Bay Penitentiary and is nicknamed 'Disneyland North'.  It seems an unusual architecture for a penitentiary.  We typically think of Banff Springs, the Supreme Court and Chateau Frontenac for this chateau style - such prestigious places to visit and stay.  Here's the prison's wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collins_Bay_Institution

How Many is a Thousand?

We made a visit to Kingston and the nearby Thousand Islands at Gananoque where boat tours take one through the Islands.  The tour is filled with beautiful scenery and cottages to admire. I'd wondered if there really were a thousand islands there.  It turns out that there are 1,864 islands.  They have criteria for what can be called an island. It must stay above water 365 days a year, and be at least 6 feet long. If you know of more criteria, let me know. We come to the origin of Thousand Islands salad dressing.  It was named for this area.  A local created the dressing and it was passed on to George  Boldt of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel ( he built the famous Boldt Castle in the area).  It grew popular and well-known in his New York hotel. We enjoyed passing by the cottage with the man on the balcony.  He was taking pictures of a model boat/ship.

Glass Curves

We were in Kingston Ontario this week and visited a glass gallery.  The frosted glass was perfect for photography - no reflections to deal with and the colours and shapes of the glass were wonderful.