No! That's Not A Typo Or Mis-Placed Text
Dear me, you really have short memories, don't you? Don't you recall that yesteryon I was whanging on about Piranesi and his 'Carceri' sketches and etchings, all to do with 'Imaginary Prisons'?
To be honest, a lot of the prisons that Ol' Pirry designed were on such a grand scale that you can hardly call their environments 'cells'. Let us have one such picture up to give you a sense of scale. Art!
Room to breathe, you might say. Pirry always had a few puny human figures included in the prison vista, to give you an idea of the scale he was working with. Conrad is not sure if these people are wardens or gaolbirds; possibly the former, as you don't allow convicted felons the opportunity to wander about freely. They might try and escape.
ANYWAY I was thinking about futuristic prisons, which is not necessarily the same as prisons of the future. Allow me to explicate. Well, I'm going to explicate anyway, regardless of what you want. I'm horrid like that. Art!
This is John Carpenter's hilariously sly dig at the city of New York: NYNY as a prison. The film is from 1981 and looks forward 16 years to when the Big Apple is a Big Cage, and that bottom picture shows what it's like - a desolate urban wasteland with no power, lighting, transport or police. Having regressed to circa 1850, you can't call it a futuristic prison. Art!
Here's another one. "No Escape" has the prisoners stuck on an island, where they live lives of squalid misery. Though set in the future you can't call it futuristic either.
If that's not what we're banging on about, then what can Conrad mean? Well, take "Face-Off" as an example. I don't think it's explicit about dates, but given the technology that is put about in being able to seamlessly swap people's faces about, it's a few years ahead of now. And how do they control their prisons? Art!
With boots. Boots that cannot be removed except by staff, and which will lock you to the steel flooring more securely than a bucket of superglue. Try escaping with half a ton of mesh flooring attached to your feet, matey.
At the other end of the spectrum is "Fortress", which is an excuse to have as much technology present as possible. Especially when it concerns The Warden, who is eventually revealed to be -
 |
| Plugged-in? |
But that would be telling. The prison is a private facility run by Men-Tel, who use the prisoners as expendable slave-labour, watched by cyborg guards who are armed with whacking big guns. Art!
The whole place is underground - cheaper than putting a satellite into orbit, are you paying attention Mister Finley-Day? - with the prison secured by a moat. O and they ensure prisoner compliance by implanting an 'Intestinator' inside their bodies, so they can be routinely tortured or killed remotely at a whim. Art!
 |
| "The Fortress diet-plan was somewhat strict" |
Now, that's what I'm talking about when I say 'futuristic' prison.
There is, of course - obviously! - another type of prison, one that has gilded bars, and where you cannot tell whom is a guard and whom is an inmate, and if I didn't include this there are people out there who would be very cross indeed. I refer, indubitably, to -
Very definitely one of a kind. You want lo-fi hi-tec? Rover!
Conrad never found them that threatening. I mean, you could destroy one with a fork.
Okay, we may come back to this, it's an interesting subject. In the meantime, whilst I go arrange tea and laundry, have another of Ol' Pirry's sketches. Art!
Speaking Of Prisons .....
Your Humble Scribe has finished reading "The Manson Murders" by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry. Justice was seen to be done; the accused were found guilty and sentenced to death. This was a bit of a shock to Charles Manson, who'd expected his cult zombies to gratefully die in his stead. For good or ill, the state of California got rid of the death penalty whilst they were all on Death Row, so their sentences were instead commuted to life imprisonment. Art!
This is what Charlie had to slum it in until 2017, when he cunningly escaped from the prison by dying. A bit extreme, but you can't deny it worked.
The Family he had 'collected' went to pieces in the years following his incarceration, with most of them now in their seventies and wanting nothing more than to be left alone. Aw, poor diddums.
Incidentally, one of their unsolved murders, that of 'Shorty Shea', which Ol' Buggy mentioned in the end of his work - and your work too, Curt! - was solved in 1977, when his body was discovered. Up to then his corpse had been 'missing'.
Conrad: The Old Dog With Sharp Eyes And A Sharper Tongue
A metaphorical tongue, before you start asking silly questions. You see, I have noticed a pattern in that feed thing that comes up when I open a new browser window. They are now sporting click-bait headlines from tabloid newspapers that sound SUSPICIOUSLY SIMILAR to the kind of thing I cannot resist on Youtube - Reddit tales about revenge, malicious compliance and entitled people. Art!
This sort of thing crops up on Youtube all the time, under the acronym "AITA", which translates as "Am I The Bottomhole?". Let me investigate.
"City In The Sky"
Pay close attention, because the Doctor is explaining, with illustrations, how planet Earth is under the purview, if not the sway, of very hostile aliens.
‘That same mystery submarine that fired
missiles at
More whispering.
‘I can’t locate the anti-missile beam’s site very accurately, not given
the trigonometric inaccuracies present in these schematics.
He stood back proudly, sticking his thumbs into his lapels, to a
mystified silence. Recognising the
problem, Ace stuck her hand up.
‘What are “squatters”?’ she asked, making him clap hand to forehead.
‘Sorry! Illegally-settled alien
residents.’
The whispering took on a confused tone.
‘How can they be illegal?’ asked an anonymous voice.
‘Because they’re not from round here.
When I said “alien” it wasn’t a figure of speech, it was the literal
truth. You have hostile aliens with
malicious intent, hiding in the Australian outback.’
If he had been less sure, or less sombre, there might have been
laughter.
‘What proof do you have?’ asked anther voice; not hostile or dismissive,
only curious.
The Doctor danced his laser spot over the wall behind him.
For a start, matey, there's the two shuttles that got blown up.
You're Pulleting My Leg
It will make sense in a minute. Conrad is going to put up another Astronomy Photographer of the Year Competition winner, this one in the junior category. Art!
Courtesy Runwei Xu and Bunyu Wang
This image is of the <ahem> 'Running Chicken Nebula', a phenomenon 6,000 light years from Earth.
It's very impressive but there's no more info about scale or size on the photo's caption.
Ah. Apparently IC 2944 is 100 light years across. So not a minor gas cloud. The stars within it appear to resemble a running chicken, it says here. Conrad not convinced. Art!
Spot the birdie
And with that, we are done. Done!
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