You can't guess the message from Longwood Gardens (near Philadelphia) this week. Here it is:
Gardens Closed
As the search for the escaped prisoner from Chester County Prison continues, our Gardens are closed until further notice. We apologize for the inconvenience but know the health and safety of our Guests and Staff are our top priority.
This has been ongoing for a week. Longwood is North America's largest tourist destination garden. How big is Longwood? It is 1083 acres. That's a lot of room to hide in. They have been searching for him for 9 days. He is Danwela Souza Cavalcante, a 34-year-old from Brazil who was convicted of murder. The break-out wasn't detected for an hour and he seems to be elusive even though there are 8 sightings so far.
"Sources tell Action News the flurry of activity was in response to the discovery of an image of Cavalcante captured on a trail camera on Longwood Gardens property. That image was captured Wednesday evening but was not viewed until Thursday afternoon by law enforcement sifting through hundreds of captured images from trail cameras throughout the perimeter."
This has national coverage in the U.S. and the latest update is just 2 hours ago. It seems to me that we have an eerie fascination with prison escapes. The Wikipedia entry starts in the 13th century with a Tower of London escape. Perhaps that escape was famous because the escapee was too heavy for the rope. It broke and he fell to his death.
Our escape is the second last entry. Noted is that he crab walked up to the roof of the building.
There's a more recent entry - September 2023 when a prisoner escaped from Wandsworth Prison in London, "apparently by strapping himself to the underside of a vehicle."
And our fascination? How creative the escape methods are.
This is an historic train station in Virginia, found on the trip to the Lily Show with Brian. The doors are marked "colored" and "white." They were separated waiting rooms. I find out that William du Post purchased the Montpelier Estate in 1901 and had the train depot built to bring supplies and transport him to Wilmington, Delaware, weekly.
A prison inmate would not be wearing polka dots, regardless of how identifiable they are. They bring lightness and play to the situation, and prisons are not for play. Black and white stripes convey the opposite of polka dots.
One article says that the origin of the black-and-white-striped prison uniform goes back to the Auburn prison system that started in New York in the 1820s. The uniforms made prisoners immediately recognizable as criminals, so if a prisoner escaped, the public could easily distinguish them from the non-criminal population.
However, Wikipedia says that stripes were used in clothing for negative symbolism starting in Medieval times. Prisoners, criminals, clowns, prostitutes, hangmen wore black and white striped clothes. The change came when Queen Victoria dressed her son in a sailor suit and started a positive trend with stripes.
When it comes to clothing, horizontal stripes have their own reputation of making a person look fatter. Discover magazine tells us that the Helmholtz illusion results in the opposite - adding horizontal stripes to shapes like rectangles makes them look thinner.
I found one striped shirt joke and a perfect prison joke:
Why does Waldo wear stripes on his shirt? Because he doesn’t want to be spotted.
Just like dots, there aren't many images in my database tagged with stripes. This one was created from interesting grunge on King Street West. It looks more like prison bars than stripes.
