Christhans is Coming

Die Hard Advent Calendar

That's Hans Gruber falling from Nakatomi Tower in the original Die Hard movie. 

Can something be simultaneously the best and the worst? This thing is totally tasteless and totally funny. Poor Hans, falling for 25 days only to land with a splat on Christmas. On the other hand no one deserves it more, he was the sleaziest villain ever.

Yippee io Ki-yay

Frank Zappa - Montana (A Token Of His Extreme)
GIGS

I'm listening to this song again, a song I haven't listened to in 50 years, and at the end of the song we've got someone singing Yippe io Ki-yay and they are doing a fine job with it (starts around the 5:25 mark) .

Well, we all (all us cool kids anyway) know the Bruce Willis line from Die Hard:

Die Hard (1988) - Yippee-Ki-Yay Scene (3/5) | Movieclips
Movieclips

So where did that some from? Did Bruce get it from Frank? Or from something older, like Bing Cosby in Rhythm on the Range from 1936:

Bing Sings "I'm an Old Cowhand"
nicoley133

It would make sense if he got it from Frank, I mean we're all contemporaries. I supposed Frank could have got it from Bing, he was older than Bruce and I.

Update November 2022 replaced missing Bruce Willis clip.

Update September 2024 replaced missing Frank Zappa clip.

Christmas Characters

Lord and Saviour C3PO

Favourite Christmas Character

Bruce Willis, of course. Via Dad's Deadpool Blog. Decorate your tree:

Die Hard Christmas Ornament

Don't Forget to Leave Cigarettes in the Ductwork

Pipeline Stupidity

Pipeline Explosion[Live Free or Die Hard: All Explosions, Car Crashes & Destruction Scenes]Eclipsa01's Supercut Archives
This scene is towards the end of the movie Live Free or Die Hard. I think it's supposed to be a pipeline exploding. At the time I thought it improbable. Now I'm not so sure.

Last week we had the Colonial Pipeline cock-up and it got me to thinking. This thing is delivering two and a half million gallons of gasoline a day to the east coast of the USA. 2.5 million gallons every day, day in, day out. I did some calculations. If the pipe is three feet in diameter, the gasoline in the pipe is moving at a rate of about one foot every two seconds. Not very fast. If we cut the hypothetical diameter of the pipe to two feet, the rate doubles to one foot every second. That should work okay, shouldn't it? Well, it there wasn't any drag, it might, but there is, and drag goes up by the square of the speed, so you might be able to get by with a smaller pipe, but the amount of power required for the pumps is going to go up. So we'll stick with a three foot diameter pipe.

A three foot diameter pipe is going to hold a heck of a lot of gasoline. Every mile of pipe is going to hold almost 300,000 gallons which is going to have a mass of 850 tons. It's not moving very fast (6 inches per second,  or about one-tenth walking speed), but we have a whole lot of it. At the sending end we will have a pump sucking gasoline out of a tank and at the receiving end we will be dumping the gasoline into another tank. What happens when the receiving tank gets full? We are going to divert the flow to another tank, which means opening a valve to the new tank and closing the one to the full tank.

What happens if we get the order wrong and close the valve to full tank but don't open the valve to the next tank? We've got a zillion tons of gasoline coming down the pipe. I don't think there is pipe fitting in the world that can resist that kind of pressure. The pipe will burst and the area will be flooded with gasoline and with that kind of destruction I wouldn't be surprised if something hot and sparky appeared on the scene and ignited this mess and we got an inferno.

Now maybe that the guys who designed these systems took this into account and built the valves with a mechanical interlock so this couldn't happen. But it's just as likely that put the interlock in software because computers are more reliable than mechanical devices and cheaper as well.

We even have the villain telling us that he is 'doing America a favor' by hacking all the computer systems that control our infrastructure, but did the yahoos at Colonial listen? No, they did not. Flipping morons. We're lucky Darkside decided to just shut down the pipeline and not blow up ever pumping stations and tank farm along the way.

In any case we had this warning about how industrial computer systems are susceptible to being hacked fourteen years ago and the yahoos in charge didn't listen. Typical.

P.S. I believe the pipeline in the movie was a natural gas pipeline, not gasoline, but the situation is similar, if not worse. Natural gas may not be as dense as gasoline, even when compressed to a zillion PSI, but with that much pressure everything is going to much more stressed and just as susceptible to blowing up due to improper operation as a regular liquid pipeline.

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.

Die Hard 30

Shots Fired At Nakatomi Plaza

I remember seeing Die Hard in the theater when it came out 30 freaking years ago.

Via Comrade Misfit

A Good Day to Die Hard

This was the silliest movie I have seen in I don't know how long. Lot's of action, plenty of funny bits and quips. There was a triple cross that had me fooled. It was the only intelligent part of the movie. Here's some related stuff I've run into recently.

Bruce Willis on the set during shooting of the movie "A Good Day to Die Hard" in Budapest, Hungary, Tuesday, May 8, 2012.

The movie starts with a car chase. The bad guys are driving a Russian version of this thing.

Giant Frigging Russian Helicopter

The movie has a helicopter big enough to carry a truck inside. If I hadn't come across this picture of such a thing I would have thought it was a fake.