Post by ๐๐๐จ๐ญ๐ญ on Aug 28, 2022 12:22:00 GMT
Like a lot of sad people, I enjoyed the Breaking Bad TV series about the fictional Albuquerque High School Chemistry teacher, Walter White, who is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer despite never being a smoker and takes to "Breaking Bad" by illicitly cooking crystal methamphetamine drugs to sell and provide for his family.
The film industry is pretty big in Albuquerque, New Mexico right now as it is much cheaper to film there than in Southern California. And New Mexico does have a lot of Blue State Liberals, so Hollywood types probably feel right at home.
Anyway, Walt is a very resentful man who, if he had been less prideful, could have been a billionaire scientist. He believes that he was cheated out of his share of a billion-dollar fortune founding a tech startup company in Albuquerque along with two Jewish friends, Elliot Schwarz and Gretchen, who used to be Walt's lab assistant and is now Elliot's wife. I got the impression that Gretchen dumped Walt for his friend, Elliot โ and in a huff Walter quit the partnership and his stake was thus bought out for a pittance just before the firm really took off. It should be pointed out that Albuquerque is where the college dropout and future Billionaire, Bill Gates and another dropout, the late Paul Allen started MicroSoft โ the vaporware computer operating system company that everybody now has to use.
Here is a youthful Bill Gates, who was arrested in Albuquerque in December of 1977 for suspicion of smoking weed while driving. Is that a good buzz or what?
It should also be pointed out that New Mexico has more Ph.D.'s per capita than any other state on account of the National Laboratories at Los Alamos that developed the atomic bomb in World War II, and the Sandia Laboratory in Albuquerque, which in World War II was affiliated with Kirtland Army Air Base and the logistics of atomic bomb delivery. The first atomic bomb was tested at the Trinity site about 28 miles from San Antonio, New Mexico inside the White Sands gunnery range on July 16, 1945.
Albuquerque has an atomic and aerospace museum, which I visited last Summer, that appears from time to time in Breaking Bad. I also visited Los Alamos on the same 2021 trip. And previously I have been to the White Sands Proving Grounds and the Rocketry museums down the Rio Grande valley, Las Cruces and Alamogordo, and I also made a jaunt over to see Roswell, where a secret Army weather balloon used for monitoring Soviet atomic fallout landed in 1947, and the newspapers called it a "flying saucer." Today Albuquerque annually hosts a huge hot-air balloon festival.
Anyway, my Dad did not have a PhD but he was an aerospace and nuclear scientist who worked for Sandia Labs, so I lived in Albuquerque for about a year when I was a kid from the early autumn of 1967 to about New Years in 1969. So I went to school there for most of First Grade and about half of Second Grade.
We moved from Las Vegas, Nevada to Albuquerque, New Mexico with an overloaded dual-axle U-Haul trailer pulled by a 1965 Pontiac Station Wagon. We crossed the Hoover Dam from the Nevada side and going downhill on the Arizona side of the Colorado River, my Dad nearly lost control of the vehicle because every time he tapped the brakes to slow down, the U-Haul locked its trailer brakes hard. He was able to get the car into a lower gear and get it slowed down before we went off into the canyon.
We drove East on Route 66 through Kingman and then Flagstaff, Arizona and stopped for the night at my Dad's Uncle's house in Grants, NM. My Dad's Uncle was the one who was a tailgunner on a U.S. Navy plane in the Pacific during World War II and was shot down. But the American submarine was there to scoop them up immediately. Just before the war he had some experience with Uranium mining at Yellow Cat, Utah with his Dad โ my Great-Grandfather โ and in the 1960s, he worked as a foreman in the Uranium mining industry at Grants, New Mexico, which is on the old Route 66 from Chicago, Illinois to the Santa Monica Pier in Los Angeles, California. After spending the night in Grants, we rolled into Albuquerque the next day and moved into our new home.
My Maternal Grandmother visited us in the Autumn of 1968, and I remember a jaunt we took in October to visit my Dad's Aunt in Silverton, Colorado and to take my Grandma at least part of the way back to Salt Lake City, Utah where she worked in a hospital as a Registered Nurse. I remember as we were driving back home across the high plains in Colorado and Northern New Mexico, that we listened to the Apollo 7 space mission live on the radio.
Apollo 7 was the first manned Apollo mission after the January, 1967 launch pad fire that killed the three "Apollo 1" astronauts on the ground while they were training โ Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee. In a show-and-tell during school once in Albuquerque, I caused quite a stir when I brought some solid rocket fuel pellets to school. They looked like gray rubber erasers such that school kids would have. My Mom made me bring a note along for the teachers which explained that the solid rocket fuel samples were "inert." But the teachers might have been a little more concerned about the note than some kid with some gray school erasers that he was calling "rocket fuel," LOL.
Basically, the solid rocket fuel for the Minuteman missile, and later the Space Shuttle solid-rocket-boosters, is a rubbery casting with a powerful oxidizer added. Once cast into an engine geometry, the solid rocket motor fuel is fairly stable. The inert samples are cast into a rocket mold exactly the same as the real stuff โ a type of rubber material, only without the powerful oxidizer added. So you can't get the inert fuel samples to burn very well without actually throwing them into a fire, just like with rubber erasers that kids have in their desks at school.
Anyway, Albuquerque has a relatively-high plains altitude, just barely exceeding Denver in elevation at over a mile high, with a dry climate and mild Summers, and relatively-mild Winters. Unlike Las Vegas, Nevada โ which almost never snows, Albuquerque gets some light snowfall in the Winter but it doesn't usually last very long. You can build a snowman after a storm, but will probably not end up doing a lot of snow shoveling most of the time.
Everybody had lawns with green grass, the way that I remember it over fifty years ago. However, today, in my old neighborhood, it seems like most all of the houses have dry landscaping. Although Albuquerque is on a plateau next to the Rio Grande River, in the climate conditions of our times, the price of water for lawn care must have gone up considerably over the last fifty years because there are not so many green lawns any longer now except in the Albuquerque Old Town areas, where Jesse Pinkman's fancy house was located (which is not far from the River).
When I lived there as a kid, I found a turtle about the size of a cantaloupe and took it home for a pet. It hibernated later in the year towards Christmas and I thought it had died, but it survived captivity a little longer. However, it did not survive the move in January when we moved to Tucson. Btw, I did not glue Danny Trejo's head to my turtle like the Mexican drug cartel did in Breaking Bad. Twisted stuff, huh.
The Walter White house on Piermont Drive is about four and a half miles away from where I lived on Sierra Drive, and it also has "desert" landscaping. The Marie and Hank Schrader house is newer and is built on the NE Albuquerque bench near the mountain range, which is even more like high-desert.
To Illustrate what I mean about the lawns, below is a picture taken from our house on Sierra Drive in Albuquerque at the start of the school year in 1968. My Sister is starting Kindergarten and standing in front of the tree in our front yard. The tree is no longer there but a bush is in its place by the sidewalk. The front lawn has been replaced by desert landscaping. I like desert landscaping but I do find that a little weird in Albuquerque after over fifty years.
When we moved to Tucson in early 1969 โ because my Dad found a new job working with my Uncle, at Bell Aero-Systems, a NASA contractor โ and the first thing to be noticed in Tucson was that many of the houses had desert landscaping โ as did ours, which was behind a green golf course. Lots of the yards in Tucson also had saguaro cacti, which only grows in the Sonora Desert, and ours in particular had a twin-branched palm tree in the front yard which came up to my waste as a kid but is now over fifty feet high. I will have to show you those pictures if I can find them. There were no palm trees or cactus growing in Albuquerque unless I am misremembering something.
Here is the same house from a different view taken with Google Maps in more modern times. The bush in front of the Volkswagen is about where the big tree was in 1968. Notice the "desert" landscaping โ gravel instead of lawn.
Below, the fictional Walter White's real house is on Piermont, which is about 4 1/2 miles away from my old childhood home in a North-Easterly direction towards the Sandia Mountains. In the aerial view below, you can see the roof above the driveway where after an argument when Skyler was being a bitch, a frustrated Walt angrily tossed his scorned pizza onto the roof.
Walt's house had a pool in the back yard. This is where the pink stuffed animal fell after it was scorched from the catastrophic airliner collision in Breaking Bad โ which Walt inadvertently caused because he allowed Jane to overdose when he could have saved her as she vomited while comatose โ just because she had insulted him earlier.
After his daughter died, the air traffic controller, played by John de Lancie, was not on his top game, and a midair collision occurred above town on his watch. Walt has to live with a lot on his conscience, including scorched pink bears falling into his swimming pool.
In the aerial view from Walt's house on Piermont Drive, it looks like (possibly) that the swimming pool has now been filled in. Swimming pools are a pain to maintain, and a lot of them have a rather seedy appearance when viewed from above.
I've heard that a dry or derelict pool was the look that producer Vince Gilligan was going for originally, but as you saw in the above video, it was a functional pool in the show until the last season when the house was abandoned and Walt broke in to retrieve his ricin poison stash that he spitefully used to murder his former meth distribution partner, Lydia. When he was prowling, he just watched wistfully as the trespassing neighborhood kids were using his now-emptied pool as a skateboard run.
I don't know why the pool in the house on Piermont is filled in now โ assuming that it is โ but this is the fate of a lot of swimming pools, it seems. We had a massive dust storm here in Arizona in 2011, I think it was, and it dumped a good foot or two of dirt into the bottom of Fritz Berg's swimming pool in Northern Phoenix. It took many days with a wheelbarrow to clean it out.
So, it has now been nine years since Breaking Bad ended, and from what I've heard, Walt's house got a black wrought iron fence put in front of the sidewalk (right in the gutter) because of the "crime scene tourism" that was becoming unbearable for the elderly lady who actually lived there. These tourist yahoos kept throwing pizzas onto the roof of her garage, LOL.
I am not sure if the iron fence is still there now, as I did not get a chance to drive by Walt's house when I was in Albuquerque in the Summer of 2021. However, I did have a nice visit at the Atomic Museum in Albuquerque, and the elderly docents were really nice. They moved the nuclear museum after the 9/11 terrorism attacks a little bit away from Kirtland Air Force Base. It is now about four miles due South of Walt's house (as the crow flies) just off of Interstate 40.
I hope that you enjoyed my bit about Albuquerque and Breaking Bad tourism. If you like content like this, with me inserting family photos in spite of my narcissism (per Balmoral's complaints), let me know. I can also do one on the 1994 O.J. Simpson murder scene in Los Angeles โ yes, I was there just after his 1995 trial โ and I can do one on the 1947 "Black Dahlia" murder scene on Norton Avenue in Los Angeles if you are interested.
Now, here is a short video clip from Polish BB tourists in Albuquerque. I won't tell any Pollack jokes about thinking BB means "Bed & Breakfast" and getting the Breaking Bad tour instead, LOL.
The film industry is pretty big in Albuquerque, New Mexico right now as it is much cheaper to film there than in Southern California. And New Mexico does have a lot of Blue State Liberals, so Hollywood types probably feel right at home.
Anyway, Walt is a very resentful man who, if he had been less prideful, could have been a billionaire scientist. He believes that he was cheated out of his share of a billion-dollar fortune founding a tech startup company in Albuquerque along with two Jewish friends, Elliot Schwarz and Gretchen, who used to be Walt's lab assistant and is now Elliot's wife. I got the impression that Gretchen dumped Walt for his friend, Elliot โ and in a huff Walter quit the partnership and his stake was thus bought out for a pittance just before the firm really took off. It should be pointed out that Albuquerque is where the college dropout and future Billionaire, Bill Gates and another dropout, the late Paul Allen started MicroSoft โ the vaporware computer operating system company that everybody now has to use.
Here is a youthful Bill Gates, who was arrested in Albuquerque in December of 1977 for suspicion of smoking weed while driving. Is that a good buzz or what?
It should also be pointed out that New Mexico has more Ph.D.'s per capita than any other state on account of the National Laboratories at Los Alamos that developed the atomic bomb in World War II, and the Sandia Laboratory in Albuquerque, which in World War II was affiliated with Kirtland Army Air Base and the logistics of atomic bomb delivery. The first atomic bomb was tested at the Trinity site about 28 miles from San Antonio, New Mexico inside the White Sands gunnery range on July 16, 1945.
Albuquerque has an atomic and aerospace museum, which I visited last Summer, that appears from time to time in Breaking Bad. I also visited Los Alamos on the same 2021 trip. And previously I have been to the White Sands Proving Grounds and the Rocketry museums down the Rio Grande valley, Las Cruces and Alamogordo, and I also made a jaunt over to see Roswell, where a secret Army weather balloon used for monitoring Soviet atomic fallout landed in 1947, and the newspapers called it a "flying saucer." Today Albuquerque annually hosts a huge hot-air balloon festival.
Anyway, my Dad did not have a PhD but he was an aerospace and nuclear scientist who worked for Sandia Labs, so I lived in Albuquerque for about a year when I was a kid from the early autumn of 1967 to about New Years in 1969. So I went to school there for most of First Grade and about half of Second Grade.
We moved from Las Vegas, Nevada to Albuquerque, New Mexico with an overloaded dual-axle U-Haul trailer pulled by a 1965 Pontiac Station Wagon. We crossed the Hoover Dam from the Nevada side and going downhill on the Arizona side of the Colorado River, my Dad nearly lost control of the vehicle because every time he tapped the brakes to slow down, the U-Haul locked its trailer brakes hard. He was able to get the car into a lower gear and get it slowed down before we went off into the canyon.
We drove East on Route 66 through Kingman and then Flagstaff, Arizona and stopped for the night at my Dad's Uncle's house in Grants, NM. My Dad's Uncle was the one who was a tailgunner on a U.S. Navy plane in the Pacific during World War II and was shot down. But the American submarine was there to scoop them up immediately. Just before the war he had some experience with Uranium mining at Yellow Cat, Utah with his Dad โ my Great-Grandfather โ and in the 1960s, he worked as a foreman in the Uranium mining industry at Grants, New Mexico, which is on the old Route 66 from Chicago, Illinois to the Santa Monica Pier in Los Angeles, California. After spending the night in Grants, we rolled into Albuquerque the next day and moved into our new home.
My Maternal Grandmother visited us in the Autumn of 1968, and I remember a jaunt we took in October to visit my Dad's Aunt in Silverton, Colorado and to take my Grandma at least part of the way back to Salt Lake City, Utah where she worked in a hospital as a Registered Nurse. I remember as we were driving back home across the high plains in Colorado and Northern New Mexico, that we listened to the Apollo 7 space mission live on the radio.
Apollo 7 was the first manned Apollo mission after the January, 1967 launch pad fire that killed the three "Apollo 1" astronauts on the ground while they were training โ Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee. In a show-and-tell during school once in Albuquerque, I caused quite a stir when I brought some solid rocket fuel pellets to school. They looked like gray rubber erasers such that school kids would have. My Mom made me bring a note along for the teachers which explained that the solid rocket fuel samples were "inert." But the teachers might have been a little more concerned about the note than some kid with some gray school erasers that he was calling "rocket fuel," LOL.
Basically, the solid rocket fuel for the Minuteman missile, and later the Space Shuttle solid-rocket-boosters, is a rubbery casting with a powerful oxidizer added. Once cast into an engine geometry, the solid rocket motor fuel is fairly stable. The inert samples are cast into a rocket mold exactly the same as the real stuff โ a type of rubber material, only without the powerful oxidizer added. So you can't get the inert fuel samples to burn very well without actually throwing them into a fire, just like with rubber erasers that kids have in their desks at school.
Anyway, Albuquerque has a relatively-high plains altitude, just barely exceeding Denver in elevation at over a mile high, with a dry climate and mild Summers, and relatively-mild Winters. Unlike Las Vegas, Nevada โ which almost never snows, Albuquerque gets some light snowfall in the Winter but it doesn't usually last very long. You can build a snowman after a storm, but will probably not end up doing a lot of snow shoveling most of the time.
Everybody had lawns with green grass, the way that I remember it over fifty years ago. However, today, in my old neighborhood, it seems like most all of the houses have dry landscaping. Although Albuquerque is on a plateau next to the Rio Grande River, in the climate conditions of our times, the price of water for lawn care must have gone up considerably over the last fifty years because there are not so many green lawns any longer now except in the Albuquerque Old Town areas, where Jesse Pinkman's fancy house was located (which is not far from the River).
When I lived there as a kid, I found a turtle about the size of a cantaloupe and took it home for a pet. It hibernated later in the year towards Christmas and I thought it had died, but it survived captivity a little longer. However, it did not survive the move in January when we moved to Tucson. Btw, I did not glue Danny Trejo's head to my turtle like the Mexican drug cartel did in Breaking Bad. Twisted stuff, huh.
The Walter White house on Piermont Drive is about four and a half miles away from where I lived on Sierra Drive, and it also has "desert" landscaping. The Marie and Hank Schrader house is newer and is built on the NE Albuquerque bench near the mountain range, which is even more like high-desert.
To Illustrate what I mean about the lawns, below is a picture taken from our house on Sierra Drive in Albuquerque at the start of the school year in 1968. My Sister is starting Kindergarten and standing in front of the tree in our front yard. The tree is no longer there but a bush is in its place by the sidewalk. The front lawn has been replaced by desert landscaping. I like desert landscaping but I do find that a little weird in Albuquerque after over fifty years.
When we moved to Tucson in early 1969 โ because my Dad found a new job working with my Uncle, at Bell Aero-Systems, a NASA contractor โ and the first thing to be noticed in Tucson was that many of the houses had desert landscaping โ as did ours, which was behind a green golf course. Lots of the yards in Tucson also had saguaro cacti, which only grows in the Sonora Desert, and ours in particular had a twin-branched palm tree in the front yard which came up to my waste as a kid but is now over fifty feet high. I will have to show you those pictures if I can find them. There were no palm trees or cactus growing in Albuquerque unless I am misremembering something.
Albuquerque house on Sierra Drive in 1968.
Here is the same house from a different view taken with Google Maps in more modern times. The bush in front of the Volkswagen is about where the big tree was in 1968. Notice the "desert" landscaping โ gravel instead of lawn.
Below, the fictional Walter White's real house is on Piermont, which is about 4 1/2 miles away from my old childhood home in a North-Easterly direction towards the Sandia Mountains. In the aerial view below, you can see the roof above the driveway where after an argument when Skyler was being a bitch, a frustrated Walt angrily tossed his scorned pizza onto the roof.
Walt's house had a pool in the back yard. This is where the pink stuffed animal fell after it was scorched from the catastrophic airliner collision in Breaking Bad โ which Walt inadvertently caused because he allowed Jane to overdose when he could have saved her as she vomited while comatose โ just because she had insulted him earlier.
After his daughter died, the air traffic controller, played by John de Lancie, was not on his top game, and a midair collision occurred above town on his watch. Walt has to live with a lot on his conscience, including scorched pink bears falling into his swimming pool.
In the aerial view from Walt's house on Piermont Drive, it looks like (possibly) that the swimming pool has now been filled in. Swimming pools are a pain to maintain, and a lot of them have a rather seedy appearance when viewed from above.
I've heard that a dry or derelict pool was the look that producer Vince Gilligan was going for originally, but as you saw in the above video, it was a functional pool in the show until the last season when the house was abandoned and Walt broke in to retrieve his ricin poison stash that he spitefully used to murder his former meth distribution partner, Lydia. When he was prowling, he just watched wistfully as the trespassing neighborhood kids were using his now-emptied pool as a skateboard run.
I don't know why the pool in the house on Piermont is filled in now โ assuming that it is โ but this is the fate of a lot of swimming pools, it seems. We had a massive dust storm here in Arizona in 2011, I think it was, and it dumped a good foot or two of dirt into the bottom of Fritz Berg's swimming pool in Northern Phoenix. It took many days with a wheelbarrow to clean it out.
So, it has now been nine years since Breaking Bad ended, and from what I've heard, Walt's house got a black wrought iron fence put in front of the sidewalk (right in the gutter) because of the "crime scene tourism" that was becoming unbearable for the elderly lady who actually lived there. These tourist yahoos kept throwing pizzas onto the roof of her garage, LOL.
I am not sure if the iron fence is still there now, as I did not get a chance to drive by Walt's house when I was in Albuquerque in the Summer of 2021. However, I did have a nice visit at the Atomic Museum in Albuquerque, and the elderly docents were really nice. They moved the nuclear museum after the 9/11 terrorism attacks a little bit away from Kirtland Air Force Base. It is now about four miles due South of Walt's house (as the crow flies) just off of Interstate 40.
"The former museum site was used in the 2008 AMC television show Breaking Bad in a storyline as a drug drop area.[24] It appeared in several scenes in the season 2 episode Negro Y Azul."
I hope that you enjoyed my bit about Albuquerque and Breaking Bad tourism. If you like content like this, with me inserting family photos in spite of my narcissism (per Balmoral's complaints), let me know. I can also do one on the 1994 O.J. Simpson murder scene in Los Angeles โ yes, I was there just after his 1995 trial โ and I can do one on the 1947 "Black Dahlia" murder scene on Norton Avenue in Los Angeles if you are interested.
Now, here is a short video clip from Polish BB tourists in Albuquerque. I won't tell any Pollack jokes about thinking BB means "Bed & Breakfast" and getting the Breaking Bad tour instead, LOL.
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