VESTS
Created | Updated Mar 25, 2002
Picture the scene. You are in the cockpit of an old army transport aircraft. The door is locked. Outside, in the howling snow, a dozen or so terrorists are riddling the plane with a lethal swathe of machine gun fire, and will soon be lobbing grenades into the fray. Your escape route, via the ejector seat, has not yet occured to your addled brain and will not do so for at least another twenty, bullet-soaked seconds.
Barring the remote possibility of a chance encounter with the "Heart of Gold", what are your chances of avoiding an encounter with a stray bullet or fifty during those tense, vital seconds? Billions, possibly trillions to one, you might hazard, and who am I to disagree with someone whose grasp of risk is so well developed?
Suppose I were to tell you that this not only happened in REAL LIFE (see the fabulous Hollywood documentary on the life of John McClane, "Die Hard 2, Die Harder"), but that the man involved, the very same John McClane, escaped with nary a flesh wound? You would be astounded, yes? Stymied, possibly. At a loss for an explanation, no doubt. Nevertheless it is true (1), and what is more, nearly the exact same thing happened to the same man in a Los Angeles skyscraper on a previous occasion ("Die Hard, But Not Quite As Hard, Obviously, As In Die Hard 2").
Much has been made elsewhere of the life-enhancing qualities of the towel, but stop for just one moment to consider the benefits of a really, really grubby vest. Not just stained. Not just oily. Seriously, deeply grubby, beyond the help of the bluest, most advanced biological washing powder in the universe.
Consider this: once a vest is totally grubby, is it possible that it could, thereafter, actually repel matter, be it a tomato sauce globule, or, say, a lead bullet travelling at the speed of sound? Might this repulsion project into the space-time continuum local to the vest, thus affording the lucky wearer a force-field? Might not, eventually, the sheer weight of such rhetorical questions actually make this true? Erich von Daniken clearly thinks so, and who are we to argue?
Footnote (1): True in the context of the solipsist viewpoint, naturally. What else is there?
Barring the remote possibility of a chance encounter with the "Heart of Gold", what are your chances of avoiding an encounter with a stray bullet or fifty during those tense, vital seconds? Billions, possibly trillions to one, you might hazard, and who am I to disagree with someone whose grasp of risk is so well developed?
Suppose I were to tell you that this not only happened in REAL LIFE (see the fabulous Hollywood documentary on the life of John McClane, "Die Hard 2, Die Harder"), but that the man involved, the very same John McClane, escaped with nary a flesh wound? You would be astounded, yes? Stymied, possibly. At a loss for an explanation, no doubt. Nevertheless it is true (1), and what is more, nearly the exact same thing happened to the same man in a Los Angeles skyscraper on a previous occasion ("Die Hard, But Not Quite As Hard, Obviously, As In Die Hard 2").
Much has been made elsewhere of the life-enhancing qualities of the towel, but stop for just one moment to consider the benefits of a really, really grubby vest. Not just stained. Not just oily. Seriously, deeply grubby, beyond the help of the bluest, most advanced biological washing powder in the universe.
Consider this: once a vest is totally grubby, is it possible that it could, thereafter, actually repel matter, be it a tomato sauce globule, or, say, a lead bullet travelling at the speed of sound? Might this repulsion project into the space-time continuum local to the vest, thus affording the lucky wearer a force-field? Might not, eventually, the sheer weight of such rhetorical questions actually make this true? Erich von Daniken clearly thinks so, and who are we to argue?
Footnote (1): True in the context of the solipsist viewpoint, naturally. What else is there?
