Gun Dream

.50-caliber guns tucked in the nose of the B-25, Philippines, 1945

I'm poking around in an old rural hardware store. I come across a set of four machine guns mounted together in a sort of an enclosure. They look like they might have been mounted on the chin of an airplane in some steam-punk movie scene. They are not like your normal WW2 era machine guns. These things are very much smaller. The longest is no more than eighteen inches long and the basic frame of the smaller ones reminds me of one of those malt mixers you used to see on the counter of the local drug store. Naturally, the whole thing has a thick patina of ancient congealed grease.

The calibers are all wrong too. The big ones use 38 Special, which is at least a real caliber. The smaller one uses something that looks like 7.63 by 39, but it's half the diameter, and only a quarter of the length because the bulk of the shell has been removed so the whole thing is only slightly more than a half an inch long. More like a cartridge for a pocket gun than a real weapon of war, but whatever.

Big Vise

I really want to buy this weapon, and if I do that I am going to need some ammo. So I start looking for ammo and I encounter another customer and we start looking at memorabilia from the Bruce Willis Die Hard movie franchise, posters, toy cars, that kind of thing. This guy has apparently spent some time here because he knows where everything is. Now we are looking for ammo and we have to sidle past a big vise that is sticking out in the aisle with a had lettered sign on it that says 'For Big Guns and Knives'.

P.S. There is a 'new' Bruce Willis movie up on Netflix called Hard Kill. I generally like Bruce Willis movies, but I am a little leery of this one. I mean, isn't Bruce getting kind of old? I know I am. But movies are the result of of the collaboration of a whole bunch of craftsmen, and I imagine whoever is on the Die Hard production team can put together a fine movie. Bruce is just like the tip of the spear. The question is whether the rest of the spear is well constructed or not. Hollywood Reporter says no.

Die Hans, Die!

Remember Hans Gruber from the original Die Hard? I certainly do. He was certainly villain of the year, if not the century. What a foul scumbag. It was a joy to watch him die.