IMDb
Die Hard (1988)
Quotes
Holly Gennero McClane: After all your posturing, all your little speeches, you're nothing but a common thief.
Hans Gruber: I am an exceptional thief, Mrs. McClane.
excerpt
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/presidents-trump-tower-penthouse-could-223148490.html
Yahoo! News
USA TODAY
President's Trump Tower penthouse could be subject to new NYC tax
Ben Adler, USA TODAY
Fri, April 17, 2026 at 3:31 PM PDT 3 min read
Mamdani responded in a more sober tone on April 17.
"The president and I both want the city to succeed," the mayor said during a news conference. "This is how you do it."
"I've made it clear to the president and to the public that I am deeply supportive of taxing the rich," he added.
A city press release from April 15 noted that "The measure targets ultrawealthy out-of-city residents and global elites who use New York City real estate as a vehicle for wealth storage rather than as homes."
Trump's buildings are known for having a large share of foreign, absentee or unknown buyers.
From 7/12/1988 ( premiere USA film "Die Hard" ) To 4/17/2026 ( Today , Friday ) is 13793 days
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 8/8/2003 ( ) is 13793 days
Stargate SG-1 - "Avenger 2.0" - television series Season 7 Episode 9 - Aired August 08, 2003
Episode Summary
Dr. Felger creates a virus that will disable other gates, but after a test run, the virus spreads, disabling the entire gate network.
(from internet transcript)
From 6/3/1988 ( as me, Kerry Burgess, while enlisted paygrade E-5, designated Fire Controlman Petty Officer Second Class (FC2), with my personal participation and commendation my official enlisted US Navy documents includes: Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal 88Feb13 88Jun03, CF-division, Missile Plot - guided-missiles Fire Control Computers Complex (operator and advanced technician, UNIVAC digital-computers Mk152 Terrier System for, primarily, SM2-ER {Extended Range} Standard Missiles ordnance), USS Wainwright CG-28, US Navy, Operation Earnest Will, Middle East Force, including Operation Praying Mantis ) To 4/17/2026 ( Today , Friday ) is 13832 days
13832 = 6916 + 6916
From 11/2/1965 ( my known birth date in Antlers, Oklahoma, USA, as Kerry Wayne Burgess ) To 10/9/1984 ( premiere USA TV series episode "Frontline"::"So You Want to Be President" ) is 6916 days
excerpt
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/iran-live-updates-us-blockade-071706042.html
Yahoo! News
ABC News
Iran live updates: Iran pushes back on Trump's claims about agreement
DAVID BRENNAN, MEREDITH DELISO, NADINE EL-BAWAB and KEVIN SHALVEY
Fri, April 17, 2026 at 4:46 PM PDT
Iran announced it would fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz on Friday
IMDb
Die Hard (1988)
Quotes
Joseph Takagi: You want money? What kind of terrorists are you?
Hans Gruber: [Chuckling] Who said we were terrorists?
IMDb
Die Hard (1988)
Quotes
Hans Gruber: [on the radio] Mr. Mystery Guest? Are you still there?
John McClane: Yeah, I'm still here. Unless you wanna open the front door for me.
Hans Gruber: Uh, no, I'm afraid not.
Washington Post
Crusade
The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War
By Rick Atkinson
Houghton Mifflin Company, 520pp. $16
Chapter One: First Night
U.S.S. Wisconsin, Persian Gulf
Dark tubes of water peeled back from the battleship's prow, curling along her hull before fanning symmetrically east and west toward the horizons. Watchstanders on the bridge peered fore and aft, checking the navigation lights of the other warships sailing with her at six-mile separations: red to port, green to starboard. Overhead, stars jammed the moonless sky with such intensity that they seemed to hang just beyond the upper poke of Wisconsin's superstructure.
The crew stood at general quarters. Earlier in the day -- Wednesday, January 16, 1991 -- they had scrubbed the teak deck, scoured the gutters, polished the brass fittings, and swept the corridors. Under Condition Zebra, all watertight doors were latched shut. In the officers' mess, seamen had lifted the ship's silver punch bowl from a glass display case and stowed it in a wooden crate. Even the trash was collected, the bags then punched with holes -- so that they would sink and not be mistaken for mines -- and heaved overboard. Over the public address system, the Roman Catholic chaplain absolved the crew of sin, then hurried to his office for a box of plastic rosaries and a flask of oil to use in anointing the dying. Now Wisconsin waited for war with dreadnought forbearance, silent except for the throb of her four great screws turning beneath the fantail.
Below decks, in the soft blue light of the ship's Strike Warfare Center, thirty men prepared the battleship for combat. In contrast to the tranquillity above, tension filled the crowded room. Electronic warfare specialists listened on their headsets for the telltale emissions of attacking enemy aircraft or missiles. Other sailors manned the radios, the computer consoles controlling Wisconsin's Harpoon antiship missiles, and a dozen other battle stations. A large video screen overhead displayed the radar blips of vessels crossing the central gulf; a smaller screen showed the charted positions of Wisconsin and her sister ships, plotted and replotted by a navigation team.
In the center of Strike the battleship's skipper, Captain David S. Bill, perched in his high-backed padded chair. Although he occasionally glanced at the screens above, the captain's attention was largely fixed on the men clustered around four computers lining the far bulkhead. Something had gone awry with the ship's Tomahawk missile system.
Lieutenant Guy Zanti, Wisconsin's missile officer, leaned over a crewman sitting at one of the consoles. "The launch side still won't accept the data," the sailor said glumly. He tapped his keyboard and pointed to the green message that popped onto the monitor. "See, it says `inventory error.'" Zanti nodded, his forehead furrowed in concentration. Now not only Captain Bill but everyone else in Strike turned to watch the lieutenant and his missile crew.
For nearly six months, Wisconsin had prepared for this moment. Five days after the invasion of Kuwait, she had weighed anchor from Norfolk, Virginia, quickly steaming through the Straits of Gibraltar and the Suez Canal to arrive on station off the Saudi coast on August 24. As Gulf Papa, the coordinator of Tomahawk launches from the Persian Gulf, Wisconsin was responsible for the seven warships that would shoot an initial salvo of four dozen missiles from the gulf. The targets and their ten-digit authorization codes had arrived with a tinkling of teletype bells just after sunset on January 16. A half-dozen officers and crewmen spent the evening drafting instructions for the other shooters, carefully choreographing their movements so that each ship would steam into the proper launch basket at the correct time. Wisconsin would fire first in half an hour; her initial Tomahawk was scheduled to rocket from the gray launcher box at 1:37 Thursday morning for the ninety-minute flight to Baghdad.
But now Gulf Papa faced imminent failure. For reasons no one in Strike could fathom, the Tomahawk computers seemed confused, refusing to transfer the necessary commands from the engagement planning console to the launch console. The resulting impasse -- "casualty," in Navy jargon -- meant the missiles could not be fired.
Again the missile crew ran through the launch procedures. All switches were properly flattened, all electrical connections secure. The console operator reloaded the software program and tried once more. Again the infuriating message popped onto the screen: "Inventory error." Still the captain seemed unfazed, as though this was just another repeat of Nemean Lion, the Tomahawk launch exercises -- named for the mythical beast slain by Hercules as the first of his twelve labors -- that the Navy had practiced before the war. But disquiet spread through the crowded room; one officer's jerky motions and rising voice grew agitated. "Keep your head together," Lieutenant Zanti snapped. "Let's think the problem through."
Failure here, they all knew, would be very bad, not only for the war plan but for the Navy. Skepticism about the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, or TLAM, was rampant in the military, even among some naval officers. Although more than a hundred missiles had been fired in exercises -- including one recently shot from the Pacific at a target in Nevada -- none had flown in combat. The closest a Tomahawk had come to being fired in anger was in August 1989, when the United States edged to within hours of attacking Hezbollah camps in Lebanon after the kidnapers of Joseph Cicippio threatened to execute the hostage.
Perhaps the greatest -- certainly the ranking -- skeptic was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Alternately fascinated by and distrustful of the weapon, General Colin Powell in October had warned Norman Schwarzkopf's chief targeteer, "I don't give a damn if you shoot every TLAM, the Navy's got, they're still not worth a shit. Any target you intend to destroy with the TLAM, put a fighter on it to make sure the target's destroyed." Tomahawk's role in the attack planning had grown and diminished along with prevailing military confidence in the weapon. The Navy had finally pulled together eight years of test data, sketched a diagram of a baseball diamond, and vowed that if the target was the pitching rubber, the overwhelming majority of warheads would detonate within the perimeter of the base paths, even after a five-hundred-mile journey.
Yet other complications persisted. The gray steel boxes housing the missiles topside contained secrets to which few men were privy. One secret -- which would remain classified even after the war -- was the route the Tomahawks would fly to Baghdad. The missile's navigation over land was determined by terrain-contour matching, a technique by which readings from a radar altimeter were continuously compared with land elevations on a digitized map drawn from satellite images and stored in the missile's computer. Broken country -- mountains, valleys, bluffs -- was required for the missile to read its position and avoid "clobbering," plowing into the ground.
For shooters from the Red Sea, the high desert of western Iraq was sufficiently rugged. But for Wisconsin and other ships firing from the Persian Gulf, most of southeastern Iraq and Kuwait was hopelessly flat. After weeks of study, only one suitable route was found for Tomahawks from the gulf: up the rugged mountains of western Iran, followed by a left turn across the border and into the Iraqi capital. Navy missile planners in Hawaii and Virginia mapped the routes and programmed the weapons. They also seeded the missiles' software with a "friendly virus" that scrambled much of the sensitive computer coding during flight in case a clobbered Tomahawk fell into unfriendly hands. A third set of Tomahawks, carried aboard ships in the Mediterranean, were assigned routes across the mountains of Turkey and eastern Syria.
Not until a few days before the war was to begin, however, had the White House and National Security Council suddenly realized that war plans called for dozens and perhaps hundreds of missiles to fly over Turkey, Syria, and Iran, the last a nation chronically hostile to the United States. President Bush's advisers had been flabbergasted. ("Look," Powell declared during one White House meeting, "I've been showing you the flight lines for weeks. We didn't have them going over white paper!") After contemplating the alternative-scrubbing the Tomahawks and attacking their well-guarded targets with piloted aircraft -- Bush assented to the Iranian overflight. Tehran would not be told of the intrusion. But on Sunday night, January 13, Bush prohibited Tomahawk launches from the eastern Mediterranean; neither the Turks nor the Syrians had agreed to American overflights, and the president considered Turkey in particular too vital an ally to risk offending.
Now it was the Navy's turn to be surprised. Again communications broke down: planners on the Navy flagship U.S.S. Blue Ridge learned of the White House prohibition less than four hours before the first launch was to take place. With frantic haste the Blue Ridge planners cut new orders, redistributing the Mediterranean shooters' targets to ships in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, thus increasing the workload of each task force by a third.
On Wisconsin, where the scheduled launch time was now just moments away, the men in Strike were running out of solutions. "All right," Lieutenant Zanti announced, "we'll start from the beginning." The data for the eight Wisconsin shots -- three pages of detailed coding for each missile -- would be retyped into the computer. The task was tedious and time-consuming. He turned to Captain Bill and the ship's weapons officer.
"Sir, we need to ask for more time," Zanti told Bill. "If we don't get an extension, we can't shoot."
The captain agreed. As the request flashed up the chain of command to Blue Ridge, an excited voice from one of Gulf Papa's nearby shooters crackled through Strike over the radio intercom: "Alpha, alpha. This is the Paul F. Foster. Happy trails."
Happy trails: the code phrase for missile away. The war had begun without Wisconsin. Deep within the battleship the missilemen labored over their keyboards, clicking furiously.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095016/releaseinfo/
IMDb
Die Hard
Release info
United States July 12, 1988
previously, here by me, Kerry Burgess
Los Angeles Times
Tut Would Have Felt at Home
October 27, 1994 BILL HIGGINS SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
The Scene: Monday's premiere of MGM's "Stargate" at Mann's Chinese with a party at the Palace. The film is a special-effects-filled science-fiction thriller with an ancient Egyptian theme. One writer, well-versed in the reigning buzzwords used to sell scripts, dubbed it " 'Die Hard' in a pyramid." [ Kerry's note: That is just completely dumb and moronic. "Happy Trails, Hans", both works refer to base8 number-systems. ]
- by me, Kerry Wayne Burgess, posted by me: 7:39 PM Pacific-timezone USA Friday 04/17/2026
