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Alcatraz (California Vacation)

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Alcatraz, also known as “The Rock,” was a maximum-security federal prison that opened in 1934 and closed in 1963. It was built largely by military prisoners and served as a military prison before being upgraded and turned into a prison in the 30s. There was no rehabilitation at Alcatraz. It was designed to imprison.

“Those who break the rules go to prison. Those who break the prison rules go to Alcatraz.”

A visit to Alcatraz begins with a ferry boat ride to the island, which is 1.25 miles off the coast. Despite the fact that you can see the prison almost immediately after disembarking, it takes a while to get there. The cold wind, strong currents and rumors of sharks are enough to keep all but the most desperate of criminals out of the water.

Here is the sign “welcoming” you to Alcatraz Island.

After sitting through a fifteen minute video explaining the history of the prison, we began the 13 story hike up to the main part of the prison. Along the way we encountered lots of birds (seagulls and pigeons, mostly) and lots of great trees and flowers. There is actually a separate gardening tour available for Alcatraz, but we missed it.

One thing I did not know was that lots of non-prisoners (mostly family members of guards and administration staff) also lived on Alcatraz. One woman explained how she woke up every morning, took a boat with her friends to San Francisco, attended school, and then returned home to Alcatraz after school ended. Many of the flowers and trees on the island were brought over by the wives of staff, and volunteers maintain them to this day.

While the outside of the grounds may look nice, the inside of Alcatraz is as cold and foreboding as one might expect. The cells are 9 foot deep, 5 foot wide, and 7 foot tall. Each one has a metal bed, “desk”, toilet, sink, and shelves. If your kids complain because they only have a PlayStation 3 and not a PlayStation 4, you should show them these accommodations.

The hallways of the prisons are named after streets (Broadway, Michigan, Times Square) and there are four cell blocks (A-D). One of them faced windows that let sunlight in — those were considered the best. The worst was D, which was also home to “the hole” — windowless, dark cells designed for solitary confinement. From some of the cells, it was said you could actually hear activity from the mainland, especially on New Years Eve when people were outside partying.

In May of 1946, six prisoners overpowered guards and managed to obtain the keys to the weapons room. The battle that ensued is known as the Battle of Alcatraz. Two guards were captured and placed into a cell. When the prisoners realized they were not going to escape, they executed them. This part of the tour was very intense as the audio explained where everything took place and pointed out bullet holes in the floors and walls where the Marines had fired into the prison in an attempt to end the standoff. When the smoke had cleared, 17 prisoners and 1 guard had been wounded. Additionally, 1 of the original prisoners and 2 guards were killed. Two of the convicts who had led the attack and executed the guards were put to death in San Quentin’s gas chamber two years later.

The most famous escape in the prison’s history was the escape of prisoners Frank Morris, John Anglin, and Clarence Anglin, known as the “Escape from Alcatraz” and immortalized in the movie of the same name. Led by Morris, the three men devised an escape worthy of a Hollywood feature. Using sharpened metal spoons and a drill made from a vacuum cleaner motor, the three carved holes through the walls of their cells which led to a ventilation shaft. Using stolen raincoats the three made an inflatable life raft, which they used — in theory — to escape the island. To buy them extra time, the three placed dummy paper mache heads (adorned with real human hair from the barbershop) in their beds, which fooled the guards throughout the night.

Here is one of the holes the criminals escaped through…

…and here is one of the heads, still on display in the cell. Do you think you would have noticed the difference, in a dark prison in the middle of the night?

The big question of course is, did the three get away? It depends on who you ask. The official answer is no — they drowned, and the government cites the discovery of an unidentified body floating in the bay a few weeks later as proof. Hollywood, and many others, believe that the three did escape. According to Wikipedia:

“However, there have since been reports that there was an illegal boat in the bay on the night of the escape, that a Chevy was stolen by three men on the mainland, and that there have been sightings of the three men and that friends and family members have received many unsigned postcards and messages. The mother of the Anglin brothers received flowers anonymously every Mother’s Day and two very tall unusual women were reported to have attended her funeral before disappearing. A call to the U.S. Marshals Office was reportedly made a day after the escape from a man claiming to be John Anglin.”

One of the things pointed out to us was that in Alcatraz, people didn’t have names — just numbers. In the gift shop while we were there was inmate number 1259 — aka William G. Baker — signing copies of his book Alcatraz #1259. I haven’t read his book yet but I’ll bet this guy has some stories to tell.

One thing I did not know anything about was the Occupation of Alcatraz, which began in 1969 and lasted for 19 months. A formerly signed treaty (the Treaty of Fort Laramie) declared that “retired, abandoned, or out-of-use federal land was returned to the Native people from whom it was acquired.” In 1969, several Native Americans claimed the island, 6 years after the prison had officially closed its doors. The occupation began with 14 people, but grew at one point to around 400. What might have started off as a good idea quickly turned into a mess. By May of 1970 the government had cut off electricity and phone service to the island, making an already uncomfortable place to live (we’re talking Alcatraz here) downright uninhabitable. In June of 1971, government officers removed the remaining Native Americans from The Rock.

Several hand painted signs from the occupation remain and serve as a reminder of that time.

After completing our tour we were hot and sweaty so we decided to take a quick shower in the prison’s shower room.

(We didn’t really take showers here.)

After standing in the shadows of such infamous inmates as Al Capone, Doc Barker, Creepy Karpis, Machine Gun Kelly, and Robert “the Birdman of Alcatraz” Stroud, we headed back to the mainland.

Funny, it doesn’t look so far from here…

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Google’s Self-Driving Car (California Vacation)

The thought of a self-driving car seems like an idea snatched from the pages of science fiction. The idea of one seems fantastic and scary at the same time. Last week at the Computer History Museum, Google had one of their self-driving cars on display where we got to learn a little bit more about how they work.

I suppose if you can afford to design and build a self-driving car, you might as well do it in a Lexus SUV, as you see here. None of my pictures of the inside of the car came out very well, but other than a small computer module mounted to the dash and a big red panic button on the center console, it looks pretty much like the inside of every other Lexus SUV. The car begins with a detailed map of the area in which it will be driving (think: super detailed Google Map). That’s the “known”. Then it discovers the “unknown” (cars, traffic lights, people) using a LIDAR system mounted to the top of the car.

LIDAR (Laser RADAR) scans the environment and identifies things that are not on the map. Here is a picture of what the LIDAR “sees” …

…and how it interprets that into 3D objects.

The current version of the software is detailed and advanced enough that not only can it tell the difference between things like cars, bicyclists and pedestrians, but it also reacts to them differently. One example the demo gave was that the software can identify a bicyclist, watch for hand signals, and then slow down if the cyclist indicates that they are about to turn in front of the car. The software is also programmed to identify orange traffic cones and speed limit signs and react accordingly. The demo did not explain how the car would deal with Oklahoma potholes.

Another video explained how human drivers, behind the wheel, continue to teach the software how to drive comfortably. If the car brakes too quickly or turns too sharply, the human driver can correct those actions and the computer will learn from it. Very interesting!

After we left the museum we drove through the middle of Google’s campus. We couldn’t get inside for a tour but we did see tons of people on those multicolored Google bicycles, and we also managed to get a picture of the front of the building. Unfortunately as you can see, one of our thumbs was partically over the camera lens, which explains why neither of us work there.

Commodore 64, Console Video Games

Computer History Museum (California Vacation)

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Get ready for another picture-intensive post that documents my family’s visit to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California! The Computer History Museum is divided into 20 numbered rooms, which advance their way through the history of computers chronologically, and starts with a pretty old computer — the Abacus.

From a historical perspective this makes perfect sense, but it doesn’t do a good job in convincing a couple of kids that this museum is not going to be boooooring.

At least the first 10 rooms of the museum cover computers that were made before I was born. There were large sections of ENIAC…

…along with a large UNIVAC…

…and several other old computers. One room covered the development of transistors and another showed old analog machines designed to track trajectories. Again, all these things were historically interesting but did little to keep the kids’ attention.

One of the things that I found really interesting was this Enigma codebreaking computer from World War II. There was a short video playing next to the machine and the kids did think that was cool.

Another historical computer on display at the museum was this Cray 1. When I was a kid all I knew about Cray computers was that they were used in creating the graphics in The Last Starfighter. It’s cut off in the picture, but this Cray contained 32k of RAM and cost between $6 and $10 million dollars.

If you are a lady and think this museum sounds boring, then check out this computer from 1969!

This computer was designed to appeal to women and was designed to store recipes and live in your kitchen! For $10,000, owners would get the computer, an apron, a cook book, and a two-week course on how to program the thing. All the recipes were stored and presented in binary, which might explain why these kitchen computers from Neiman-Marcus did not sell well.

Also on display was this IMSAI 8080 computer. I don’t think anyone knows what this machine actually does. People only know it as “that computer from Wargames!”

The first room that really captured the kids’ attention was the one that focused on robots. There were several robots on display, from small toys to industrial machinery.

Then, as my dad would say, “this is where I came in.”

Starting with this Apple 1 (signed by Woz), the museum got into what I think of as the birth of home computers. While I know hobbiests dinked around with Altairs and other home machines, it wasn’t until they had monitors, keyboards, and simple storage that home computers came in to their own.


TRS-80 Model I


Retro Row


More Retro Machines

This was the first point in the museum where I could say, “I had one of those!” (Or in some cases, “I still have one of those!”)

One room contained a large display of peripherals, from early mice and keyboards to all kinds of controllers. Here are a few I recognized! Of course I owned (and own) Atari Joysticks and that Wico stick on the right, but that Archer joystick in the middle is the one we had for our Apple computer growing up as well.

The next part of the museum focused on computers in arcade machines. Two very famous arcade machines were on display at the museum.

Computer Space is, of course, the first coin-operated machine.

This was the first Pong machine (a prototype) that was put on location at Andy Capp’s. If you have ever heard the story about how the first arcade machine broke down because it was so jammed full of quarters that it would no longer operate, this is that very machine.

This room got more into computer software. As you can see by these games on display, this area focused on text adventures. A kiosk running Zork was on display and Mason spent a few minutes working his way through the first couple of screens.

There were three playable machines in the “computer game” area running a text adventure, Pac-Man, and Pong. All three were noticeably running emulators.

As quickly as the tour began, it ended. The last room focused on the “dot com” revolution. The coverage felt a little uneven with a lot of focus on early machines and not much on modern history. The kids would have liked more interactive exhibits (kids love pressing buttons and watching videos). Overall the museum was very enjoyable and we did learn some things. Seeing the old historical machines was exciting.

There was one last exhibit on display at the museum but I’ll be saving that for a separate post of its own.

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Sequoia National Park (California Vacation)

The drive to to Sequoia National Park was long — four or five hours from where we had stayed the night before — but oh so worth it. In less than an hour, we went from roughly sea level to an elevation of more than 7,500 feet. The road to Wuksachi Lodge is narrow and hugs the mountains. On their way up drivers are in the outside lane, giving them both a fantastic view and white knuckles. Fortunately there are multiple scenic “pull offs” so that you don’t have to take pictures while driving.

Once we arrived at the park, Susan and Morgan went one way while Mason and I went the other. While some of the trees in the forest are taller than others, all of them are tall.

The largest tree in the park is General Sherman. By volume, General Sherman is, by volume, the largest living thing on the planet. The tree is 2,300 to 2,500 years old; it’s also 275 feet tall, 102 feet around at the base and 25 feet around at the trunk. It’s a massive, massive tree. If you ever want to feel small, standing in the Sequoia National Park can help you with that.

On the way to the General Sherman tree you pass a couple of interesting things, like this fallen tree that you can walk through. Later in the day we drove through the auto log, a fallen tree that you can drive through.

We didn’t spend a heck of a lot of time in the Sequoia Park, but it was awesome to see and I know it was on Susan’s bucket list so that made it even more special. It was definitely something to stand in front of those trees.

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Jelly Belly Factory Tour (California Vacation)

Susan has a knack for finding tours that are both interesting and free. One she found during this trip was a tour of the Jelly Belly Factory, located in Farifield, California.

Outside the factory are several “bean-wrapped” cars, including this one, a van, a VW bug, and several box trucks. These must be a great deterrent for road rage. How can you get mad at a car covered in jelly beans, even in California traffic??

The festive look continues inside the factory lobby.

While waiting for the tour to begin visitors are encouraged to visit the free Jelly Belly bar, where they can get two Jelly Bellies of three different flavors for free. I tried sour apple, pie a’la mode, and vanilla ice cream. Susan picked from the “gross out” menu and picked (I am not kidding) barf, snot, and (I think) skunk. Her response? “These are gross!” Our response? “DUH!”

Throughout the tour there were several Jelly Belly murals such as this one. Unfortunately most of them were inside the factory, where photography is not allowed. The murals varied in size and each one contained “between 10,000 and 14,000 individual beans.” This one of Ronald Reagan was in the lobby. Ronald Reagan loved jelly beans so much that a special container was built to hold them on Air Force One, and the blue Jelly Belly (blueberry) was created in 1981 for Reagan’s inauguration so that they could have red, white and blue jelly beans.

The factory tour consisted of walking around on a catwalk built above the factory floor and watching machines mix, tumble, and sort jelly beans. I’m not sure why photography was not allowed; it’s not like one could build a competing candy factory based off of a few iPhone pictures.

At one point in the tour we saw 8 people standing around a giant bin of jelly beans, picking red ones out by hand one at a time. Apparently someone dumped the wrong flavor into a mix and they were being manually removed.

Another thing I enjoyed seeing were these “Belly Flops,” Jelly Bellies that are abnormal in shape and get sifted out of the main mix. These were available for sale, although I believe they sell them in stores as well.

Like most tours of this kind, the tour ends in the gift shop, where shoppers (who have been smelling jelly bean wafts for 30 minutes) arrive with credit cards and appetites in hand. Susan got some Jelly Belly flip-flops while the kids and I got some bottles of Jelly Belly Cola. We all also received complimentary packages of Jelly Bellies.

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Warner Bros. Studio (Part 2 of 2) (California Vacation)

After completing our tour of the back studio lot of Warner Bros., we moved to some of the television sets. The first set we toured was the set of the television show Sullivan and Son. We have not seen the television show Sullivan and Son yet, but it was one of two sets we were allowed to take photos on.

Here is a picture I found online of the show. Below are pictures of my kids in front of the set.

This is what is referred to as a “dollhouse” set. It’s called that because the set has three walls (the sides and back) while the front wall is missing. The audience sits across from the set in these seats. The shows are taped before a live studio audience and the laughter you hear is real (not a laugh track). If a joke is performed and no one laughs, production is halted and the writers quickly rework the joke and re-shoot it.

After touring the Sullivan & Son set we toured two more sets. The first was the set of Big Bang Theory. Big Bang Theory has currently wrapped for the season and so almost anything that would be recognizable was covered with plastic tarps. So even if I had taken any pictures on that set (which I didn’t) they would be of rooms full of tarps.

The next set we visited was for a show called “Pretty Little Liars.” It was not a dollhouse set but rather a “practical” set, in which the rooms all had four walls. Once you get inside the set it’s like a bizarre maze. The entrance to the set was of a school hallway, with stairs that led nowhere and doors that led to people’s bedrooms. It was very strange and disorienting and I was continually reminded of how things in studios look “fake” but end up looking like real locations on the small and large screen.

The reason we were able to visit so many television sets was due to this:

That’s our cart, which had a tire blow out. (I’m innocent; I was sitting in the back!) With our cart out of service we had enough to visit the one still existing set from Friends, Central Perk.

Central Perk was the coffee shop the character from the TV show Friends frequented. The set is still fully assembled 10 years later and a good opportunity for photos. I have no idea what Morgan is doing in this photo.

At this point we moved to the museum portion of the tour. This is a lot of pictures of things from TV shows and movies so I will go quickly. Here are costumes from:


Big Bang Theory


Friends


Batman


More Batman


Superman


The Hangover


Charlie Sheen’s urn from 2 1/2 Men


Sandra Bullock’s space suit from Gravity

If you are a fan of Harry Potter, the entire second floor of the museum was dedicated to costumes and props from those films.

The last thing I’ll leave you with are these original line cartoon drawings. There were several of these (under glass) along with some storyboards from original Bugs Bunny cartoons. I really enjoyed looking at these up close.

I know the last couple of posts have been pretty picture intensive, but we saw so many cool things that I wanted to share — and trust me, we saw many more cool things that I did not include! To anyone interested in film history, I highly recommend the Warner Bros. back lot tour. We were very glad we did it.

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Warner Bros. Studio (Part 1 of 2) (California Vacation)

The Warner Bros. studio in Burbank, California offers daily tours of its back lot. This is one of the things I was really looking forward to seeing on the vacation and it did not disappoint. The Warner Bros. back lot consists of almost 30 sound stages and lots of other sets both indoors and out. Some of them were instantly recognizable, some of them were recognizable with a bit of prodding, and some you wouldn’t recognize in a million years.

Our tour began with a brief movie showing clips from nearly 100 years worth of WB movies, television programs, and cartoons. Between the four of us I would say we recognized roughly 20% of the clips. Many of them were from old movies and new television shows we had not seen. Once the movie was over we headed outsite, climbed upon our 15-man golf cart, and hit the road!

This is the first location our guide pointed out to us:

“Why are we looking at a dirt road,” we all asked. Apparently, this is the dirt road that a T-Rex chased a jeep down in Jurassic Park.

The road was only about 30 feet long and our guide explained that they drove up and down the road many times to string together enough footage for the chase sequence.

Just past this road on the left was a small cabin.

“Has anybody here seen TRUE BLOOD?” our guide asked. Nobody on the train had seen True Blood. “Oh well, if you had, then you would recognize this cabin as Merlottes Bar and Grill!” We quickly learned that telling the guide that we had not seen a movie or did not watch a television show didn’t prevent her from showing us the location regardless.

The pond on the right hand side was much more interesting.

This pond has been a lot of things, including the sea in Poseidon. However, what I recognized it from was this:

If you look closely you’ll see Pee-Wee Herman swinging across that very same pond.

Actually if you want see what the back lot looks like (at least the outside of the sound stages), watch the chase scene from Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. Here’s a shot of the fake backdrop Pee-Wee places to fool the security guards chasing him:

…and here’s a shot of the back lot itself.

There were tons of little places that you might only see in a few seconds of a movie. Here are a small set of steps that lead to nowhere.

(Note the square around the tree. All the trees are actually potted plants and can be added or removed depending on what the shot calls for.)

In the movie Gremlins, these steps are in the heart of Chinatown, and lead down to a mysterious shop where a man looking for a Christmas present for his son purchases a Mogwai!

Right around the corner from this was a small alley.

You might recognize it as the dark alley in which a wet Pee-Wee Herman runs into a bunch of thugs shortly before discovering Madame Ruby the Fortune Teller…

…or you might recognize those steps as the ones the orphans sing on in the 1981 version of Annie.

It was also the place where Spider-Man’s famous “upside-down” kiss took place.

A block or so away is the front of Annie’s orphanage. Many of the locations were difficult to recognize because the fronts of many of the buildings are actually foam core and can be switched from brick to rock to wood easily. Also all of the door knobs, lights, trimmings, and everything else are designed to be easily changeable.

One other interesting thing we encountered was the Mystery Machine, getting some fuel at the lot’s onsite gas station.

In Part 2 of this post I’ll be sharing pictures from some of the television sets and inside the WB museum.