Furies

Furies | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix Phillippines

Comic book style criminal underground fantasy, in Paris. Very entertaining in a John Wick kind of way. A lot of it didn't make much sense, what with every player apparently double crossing every other player. Even when we get to the end we still aren't sure of who's on first. But we have a cute young woman bringing the smack down of box lots of thugs, so it's fun.

In the last episodes we have a secret underground train that runs continuously in the subway tunnels beneath Paris. I think I've seen the same thing in a couple of other movers. In the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, the head of the Japanese secret service, Tanaka, has a secret subway train. The Debt is one and it isn't really a secret train, there are just some secret bits.

Goldeneye

James Bond 007: GoldenEye - Official® Trailer [HD]
TrailersPlaygroundHD

Great Bond movie. All kinds of crazy technology, some improbable, but most of it has some basis in reality. I do wonder about the golden gem mounted in a frame that is apparently needed to send the fire command to the Goldeneye satellite.  Now with all the complicated stuff I've learned about since then, I wonder if you could somehow encode a passcode in the gem, a passcode that can be extracted using a relatively simple scanner. Convoluted and cumbersome, but then people are always dreaming up complicated and cumbersome procedures. Still, haven't heard of anyone encoding anything in oversize gemstones, but you know what they say about the Internet - if you can imagine it someone has already done it.

Somewhere in the middle of the movie, Bond and Natalya, the Bond girl, are arrested by the Soviet military and taken to a prison in Moscow. The big, bad villain shows up during their interrogation and shoots the interrogators. Bond uses the ensuing chaos to escape. He picks up an AK-47 from a dead guard and then he and the girl are running for their lives, down the halls, around corners and through doors. Simultaneously he is engaged in a running firefight with Soviet soldiers. He is mowing them down like ten pins. And then he steals a tank. 

But let's stop for a minute before we run off into the wonderful tank fantasy, let's stop and count the number of rounds he fired while running through the halls of the prison. I mean, he fired a bunch. A banana clip for AK-47 holds 30 rounds. I am pretty sure he fired more than 30 rounds. He could easily have picked up another magazine along the way, I mean the hallways are littered with dead Soviet soldiers, but how many magazines would he have needed? Did he fire 20 rounds or 200? Or was it two thousand? Enquiring minds want to know. Now I could go back and rewatch that scene and count the number of shots fired, but then I got an idea. Let's ask ChatGPT, so I did:

User

In the movie Goldeneye, how many shots from his AK-47 did James Bond fire during his escape from the Russian prison in Moscow?

ChatGPT

In the movie "GoldenEye," during James Bond's escape from the Russian prison in Moscow, he uses an AK-74 assault rifle. Bond fires a total of 76 shots from the AK-74 during this action-packed sequence. This moment is part of the larger escape scene that involves the use of different weapons, including the tank, making it one of the memorable action sequences in the film.

And there you go. More useless information supposed to fire my imagination. 

Previous posts about the movie Goldeneye.

You Only Live Twice

You Only Live Twice (1967) Official Trailer - Sean Connery James Bond Movie HD
Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers

Bond goes to Japan to deal with Blofeld in his secret island hideout. That Blofeld must have been quite a guy. At the time the Russians and the Americans are struggling to put a two-man capsule into orbit, Blofeld has constucted a much larger and more capable spacecraft as well as a fully equipped missile launching facility in the center of a dormant volcano. We're not even going to mention that he has developed a spacecraft that can land vertically, nearly 50 years before Elon Musk managed that.

Diamonds Are Forever

Diamonds Are Forever (1971) Official Trailer - Sean Connery James Bond Movie HD
Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers

Pretty typical Bond movie - lots of action, pretty girls & fast cars in a variety of locations scattered across the globe. The car chases are nore like something out of Smokey and the Bandit than the European chase scenes we usually get. We also get a smattering of heavy industry and a fantastic super weapon, great stuff all around. We've also got a fancy house:

John Lautner's concrete domed Elrod House overlooks Coachella Valley

The Elrod House serves as Willard Whyte's vacation home where he is being held captive by Bambi and Thumper, two of the most attractive thugs you are likely to meet. Supposedly 'ten miles away', it's actually 180 miles away in Palm Springs. It last sold in 2016 for just under $8 million. Redfin now estimates that its value has almost doubled. Thank you extravagant government spending.

The two oh-so-polite thugs (Mr. Wint & Mr. Kidd) have appeared here before, as has Willard Whyte (Jimmy Dean of country music and sausage fame).

On Her Majesty's Secret Service

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) - Official Trailer - George Lazenby Bond Movie HD
Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers

I really enjoy re-watching all these old Bond movies. I am picking all kinds of little bits that I missed the first time.

George Lazenby marries Diana Rigg who gets killed at the end of the movie. George went off and did other movies, but none that I connected with him. I did notice that he was in several of the Emmanuelle movies. Telly Savalas plays the villain Blofeld. I dunno why, but Telly just doesn't do it for me. Perhaps because I've seen too much of him in cop shows on TV (Kojak).

Much of the dialog was unintelligible. I don't know whether it's the accents or my ears or I'm getting old. Thank goodness for subtitles. I've had this problem with this movie before. Fortunately, understanding the dialog isn't crucial to enjoying the film. 

From Russia With Love

From Russia With Love (1963) Official Trailer - Sean Connery James Bond ...
Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers

A fine movie with plenty of action, a plausible plot and plenty of pretty girls. Highlights:

Armalite AR-7 Survival Rifle

Armalite AR-7 Survival Rifle, disassembled

• secret agent briefcase with fifty gold sovereigns, a hidden knife, a booby trap and an AR-1 25 caliber, single shot sniper rifle.

Periscope, Kerim Bey & James Bond

• periscope into the Russian Embassy in Istanbul

Gypsy Camp Scene - From Russia with Love - James Bond Source Music
Fictional Music

• gypsy girls, gypsy girl dancing, gypsy girls fighting. Did I mention there are gypsy girls? Oh, that's right I did.

1960 Ford Ranch Wagon

• Ford Ranch Wagon. Seeing this car really struck a chord with me. My inner ten year old really likes the 1960 Ford Galaxy and the 1961 Thunderbird.

My approximation of Bond's escape route from Istanbul to Venice

Simplon Orient Express

• The fight with the SPECTRE agent on the Simplon Orient Express
• The truck versus helicopter fight.

Fairey Huntress Powerboat

Islands off the coast of Istria near Futana
Possible location of boat chase

• The flight across the northern end of the Adriatic Sea from Istria to Venice in a power boat with 200 gallons of fuel in 50 gallon drums held in a rack on the back.

Webley Flare Pistol

• The destruction of the incompetent bad guys by dumping the gasoline in the water and setting it afire with the Very flare gun.

Rosa Klebb's shoe dagger

• Klebb uses her pointy shoe to fight with Bond.

P. S. The scenes of Bond and the girl in Venice were shot on a green screen. It's pretty obvious they weren't actually in Venice. Someday I need to find out how they did that.

Free on Amazon Prime

Thunderball

Thunderball (1965) Official Trailer - Sean Connery James Bond Movie HD
Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers

Another day, another Bond film. Life doesn't get much better than this. I was thinking about looking up all the girls and finding some cheesecake shots to post, but then I stumbled over this video, so I'm taking the easy way out.

The Bond girls of ...Thunderball! [Behind the scenes]
Frogwoman Org Reloaded

Thunderball has appeared here before.

Dr. No Official Trailer #1 - Sean Connery Movie (1962) HD

Dr. No Official Trailer #1 - Sean Connery Movie (1962) HD
Rotten Tomatoes Classic Trailers

Pretty great, even after 60 (!) years. Available on Amazon Prime. I watched the four Daniel Craig Bond movies this summer while I was recuperating. At that time, those were the only ones that were free (if you are a Prime subscriber), but all the others required an extra payment. Now they are all 'free'. Ursula Andress provides the eye candy:

Ursula Andress

Ursula has appeared here before.

Badthink

007 Free Radicals and OPC3Douglas Mizzi
Midwest Chick posts about a UK program to eliminate free radicals, which prompts me to comment:

Only a small fraction of the population read anything longer than a tweet, and only a fraction of those people understand what they read. Most people operate using speech and social cues to get along and go along. The people who are organizing violent attacks might have a brain, but the people who actually commit the attacks haven't read diddly, much less understood it. The powerful are only interested in eliminating anyone who threatens their power, and the only people who are capable of doing that are the ones with brains, the ones who read. So the government's plan to eliminate all badthink makes perfect sense. Keep your head down.

Goldfinger

Goldfinger • Theme Song • Shirley Bassey
HD Film Tributes

This post is kind of backwards. This tune is where I ended up, and it's pretty great, just like the movie. Of course I was only 13 when it came out so my mind was still very impressionable. Suffice it say I was impressed. We got to the song from this scene:

James Bond - Goldfinger - You expect me to talk? No Mr Bond I expect you to die!
Nick Blundell

We got here because I was thinking about my idea for a giant spaceship powered by a linear accelerator. I was originally thinking that it should be built in orbit around the Moon due to the economy of lifting materials from the surface of the moon, but then I got to thinking that if this motor is as powerful as it needs to be, the ship could lift off from Earth. It might not be able to carry all of the reaction mass it would need for an extended journey, but we can pick that up later. Lack of vacuum planetside might pose some technical problems, but whiz kids like nothing better than a challenge so I am sure they can sort it out. But the big issue is what kind of effect is a continuous thread of iron travelling at half the speed of light going to have on the Earth? Will it dig an asteroid sized crater? Or will it just bore a hole right through the crust and just become part of the molten center? Of course, it is not going to stay pointing perfectly in line with its original direction, it's going to be wandering all over the place. God forbid it gets out of control and tips over. Everything on this hemisphere is going to be in range. Maybe building it in orbit around the moon is a good idea.

Aston Martin DB5 Stunt Car

007's Aston Martin DB5: We Drive James Bond's Car From "No Time To Die" | Carfection 4K
Carfection
We watched the latest James Bond film No Time To Die the other day and it was wonderful. I started looking into the car and fell into a fantasmagorical world, much like Alice. You could probably write a book about all the Aston Martin cars used in this movie.

There is one scene where the bullet proof glass in the car's windows is put to the test, so I go to wondering and found this.

Bulletproof Glass | Outrageous Acts of Science
Science Channel

Texas Armoring Corporation armors customer's vehicles. They offer several levels of ballistic protection. Higher levels cost more and are going to increase the vehicle's weight. Glass is heavy.

If you are gunning for James Bond, you need to bring something will a little more oomph than those puny little 9mm submachine guns.

James Bond

As an seven year old in about 1983, in the days before First Class Lounges at airports, I was with my grandad in Nice Airport and saw Roger Moore sitting at the departure gate, reading a paper. I told my granddad I'd just seen James Bond and asked if we could go over so I could get his autograph. My grandad had no idea who James Bond or Roger Moore were, so we walked over and he popped me in front of Roger Moore, with the words "my grandson says you're famous. Can you sign this?" As charming as you'd expect, Roger asks my name and duly signs the back of my plane ticket, a fulsome note full of best wishes. I'm ecstatic, but as we head back to our seats, I glance down at the signature. It's hard to decipher it but it definitely doesn't say 'James Bond'. My grandad looks at it, half figures out it says 'Roger Moore' - I have absolutely no idea who that is, and my hearts sinks. I tell my grandad he's signed it wrong, that he's put someone else's name - so my grandad heads back to Roger Moore, holding the ticket which he's only just signed. I remember staying by our seats and my grandad saying "he says you've signed the wrong name. He says your name is James Bond." Roger Moore's face crinkled up with realisation and he beckoned me over. When I was by his knee, he leant over, looked from side to side, raised an eyebrow and in a hushed voice said to me, "I have to sign my name as 'Roger Moore' because otherwise...Blofeld might find out I was here." He asked me not to tell anyone that I'd just seen James Bond, and he thanked me for keeping his secret. I went back to our seats, my nerves absolutely jangling with delight. My grandad asked me if he'd signed 'James Bond.' No, I said. I'd got it wrong. I was working with James Bond now. Many, many years later, I was working as a scriptwriter on a recording that involved UNICEF, and Roger Moore was doing a piece to camera as an ambassador. He was completely lovely and while the cameramen were setting up, I told him in passing the story of when I met him in Nice Airport. He was happy to hear it, and he had a chuckle and said "Well, I don't remember but I'm glad you got to meet James Bond." So that was lovely And then he did something so brilliant. After the filming, he walked past me in the corridor, heading out to his car - but as he got level, he paused, looked both ways, raised an eyebrow and in a hushed voice said, "Of course I remember our meeting in Nice. But I didn't say anything in there, because those cameramen - any one of them could be working for Blofeld." 

I was as delighted at 30 as I had been at 7. What a man. What a tremendous man.  - Marc Haynes

Via Astral Codex Ten

Ural Motorcycles

Ural Motorcycle Review - Our Best Sidecar
FortNine

Sidecars are . . . what? Weird? Wonderful? Sidecars have been around forever, but I'm not sure they were ever a very good idea. The certainly capture the imagination, and whenever one makes an appearance they cause a stir, but a good idea? Maybe an expedient solution to a shortage or four wheel vehicles, but I don't think they were ever a good idea. They make good movie though.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (4/10) Movie CLIP - Motorcycle Chase (1989) HD
Movieclips

The motorcycles used in the movie were not the original Beemers, but other brands dressed up to look like German army motorcycles, which were what the Ural was copied from.

I remember seeing Sean Connery hopping about on the giant boulders in the underground temple in the movie Never Say Never Again and thought he was not as spry as he used to be. He was 53. I was still shocked to see him in this Indiana Jones movie playing an old man. He was 59.

Ural motorcycles have appeared here a couple of times.

Dubai

Expo 2020 Airbus 380, LAX

The decoration on this aircraft got my attention, so I did a little checking. Expo 2020 is going to be held in Dubai next year. Looking at the website, I notice this little blurb: 

How can we build more inclusive societies?

I thought that was a little odd considering that regimes in the Mideast are among the most draconian in the world. From Wikipedia:

Companies in Dubai have in the past been criticised for human rights violations against labourers. Some of the 250,000 foreign labourers in the city have been alleged to live in conditions described by Human Rights Watch as "less than humane".

Okay, that's not news. As I recall most of those laborers are from India and/or Pakistan. I suspect conditions in those countries are what prompted those laborers to come to Dubai. Could it be that working for as a wage-slave in Dubai is better than their life back home?

Okay, enough about the downtrodden masses, how about a little real-life James Bond type adventure?

Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum in January 2018

Seems Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, daughter of the Prime Minister of the UAE (United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is one), tried to 'escape' with the help of a former French intelligence officer via jet-ski and sailing yacht but was forcibly brought back.

Sailing yacht Nostromo

Could it be Latifa doesn't care for Dubai's brand of inclusiveness?

Pic of the Day

Famke Janssen (Xenia Onatopp) driving the Ferrari

Looking over an earlier post, wondering why a woman would wear lipstick when she is setting out to kill people, I am reminded of Xenia Onatopp, the femme fatale from the James Bond epic Goldeneye. She was a very nasty woman. She had no trouble mixing makeup and murder. So I go Googling for a picture of her with her AK-47. I didn't find anything that did her justice, but I did find this photo of the technological conglomeration they used to film her in the car chase scene.

Bezant

Dinosaurs on the Moon!

Daily Timewaster (so you know how valuable this post will be) posts a picture, which leads to the above scene from Moon Zero Two.


Moon Zero Two Inception
One of the stars of this Hammer Film is Catherine Schell:

Born in Budapest, Hungary, Catherine is the scion of a once wealthy German family. Her father, the Baron Paul Schell von Bauschlott, was a well-respected diplomat until the Nazis confiscated their estates during WWII. Her family was living in poverty until 1948 when they sought asylum in Vienna and Salzburg as the communist regime began to take hold in Hungary. In 1950, her family emigrated to the States and the Baron renounced his title in order for his family to gain citizenship. In 1957, her father joined Radio Free Europe, taking the family to Munich where she developed an interest for acting and trained at the prestigious Falconberg School. - paraphrased from IMDB

Sounds an awful lot like Veruschka.

Catherine Schell as Maya, the shapeshifting alien in Space: 1999

Catherine was in a few other science fiction films and also had a part in the James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service.


On Her Majesty's Secret Service (2/9) Movie CLIP - Just a Slight Stiffness (1969) HD
Catherine is the woman with the long blond hair who ask's James 'please, what is a bezant' (at the 1:25 mark). James' answer sounds like 'female boar' which sounds totally bogus. Who is going to put four sows on their coat of arms? Well, I'm sure someone did, once, but it wasn't any of James ancestors, I can tell you that. I suppose the writers were looking for some kind of double entendre, but if that's the case I totally missed it.

James Bond's family Coat of Arms

Turns out Bezants are the gold circles in the center and there are only three of them, not four, but's that kind of like quibbling over whether James was called Jimmy or James when he was a kid.

Gold solidus of Theodosius II (r. 408-450), minted in Constantinople, 430–439, Athens, Numismatic Museum

Bezants were originally gold coins from Byzantium.

More Studly

James Bond spiral jump stunt
This stunt appeared in the 1974 James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun. If you have seen the movie, you may have wondered how they did it. I presumed it was faked somehow with wires and a blue screen, but it wasn't. The stunt was originally part of a thrill show that was co-opted by the James Bond franchise.  Jalopnik has the whole story.


Wireframe model of James Bond spiral jump stunt
For the movie, they got some high powered simulation software to model it before they tried it for real. This was in 1974. The simulation was run on a real computer on account of PC's did not yet exist. Via Road & Track

1974. That was 42 years ago, around the same time as I was framing houses in Houston and California Bob's house was being built in San Francisco (see previous post).

Skyhook

James Bond and Claudine 'boob-a-licious' Auger in Thunderball

All airports have airport codes. Anyone who has traveled by air in the USA is probably familiar with some of the big ones like Atlanta (ATL), Chicago (ORD), LA (does anyone even say Los Angeles anymore?) (LAX), Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) and Portland (PDX). Okay, not everyone knows PDX, I just threw that in there because I go there ten times a year. Even no account little podunk airports like Hillsboro (HIO, my neighborhood airport) and Pinal Airpark (MJZ), just North of Tuscon, have codes.

Pinal Airpark, Marana Arizona. Notice that you can see the entire 6,000 foot long runway AND you can count the airliners. Flippin' airliners are big.

    Iaman paid a visit to MJZ this week and saw a bunch of airliners parked there. Last year when Boeing's Dreamliner was grounded a bunch of them ended up here. Seems that since Boeing went to so much trouble to set up their international assembly line to build these planes, they were loath to shut it down just because the FAA says they weren't allowed to fly them. Well, they could fly them, they just weren't allowed to carry any passengers. I mean how else were they going to get them from their final assembly plant in Everett (just north of Seattle), Washington to Tuscon, which is where MJZ is?
    MJZ is currently the largest boneyard for civilian aircraft. Davis-Monthan Air Force Base is just down the road and it dwarfs Pinal by a factor of, oh, I dunno, a zillion to one or so. Typical Americans. Whine about having to pay an extra $50 for airfare but willingly fork over thousands of dollars every year so the Air Force's flyboys can go for joyrides anytime they want in their supersonic hotrods. That's democracy in action for you, although I fail to see how this aspect is any different than communism. Never mind, that's all beside the point. I'll try to stay on track here.
    There is another civilian boneyard in Roswell, New Mexico. They store old airlines, but they are also strong in the scrap metal business.

Pinal Airpark got it's start in WW2 training pilots for the military as part of the "50,000 pilot training program". During the Vietnam war it was home to the CIA's Intermountain Airlines. Intermountain eventually became part of Evergreen Aviation, based in McMinnville, Oregon (just down the road from here), which is where the Spruce Goose ended up.

     Robert Fulton started development of his skyhook there. Hard to tell how often it was used for real, I mean it was basically a clandestine activity. We do have videos from some of the tests and the ones in the movies. The Air Force kept it in their back pocket until 1996 when they finally decided to let it go.

There is also an automobile racetrack here. The local Porsche club seems to be only ones who use it.

Update July 2021 replaced missing video.

Calling Mr. White

Walter J. White, left, was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison for dealing methamphetamine. | Bryan Cranston, right, in character as Walter White on AMC's television show "Breaking Bad." (Credit: Police Handout | Frank Ockenfels/AMC)

Dustubury tells us that Walter White has been busted for meth. Yes, life is imitating art. A real person with the same name as the chemistry teacher from Breaking Bad got busted for the same crimes as our TV character was committing.

Willard White, baritone

    But wait a minute, wasn't there a comic book character named Willard White? Some kind of big shot. We ask the Google and Google serves up the Jamaican born English Baritone by that name. Never heard of him before, but Willard White, that name sure rings a bell. Let's back up (and erase the last name) and see what else the Google can find, and lo and behold:

Willard Whyte, aka Jimmy Dean, as a stand in for Howard Hughes from Diamonds Are Forever

Just goes to show all roads lead to James Bond.