Sunday, July 31, 2011

Declassified! Operation Haircut Wraps Up as Agent 8771 Returns from Exile

CWMC Improbable Bodyworks Division, Ardrossan, Ab: No sooner had the ink dried on the latest in a seriously substantial series of funding requisitions and debt-ceiling hikes did Agent 8771 abscond with his family in tow and seek refuge deep in the Canadian Rocky Mountains; seemingly far away from the inevitable financial thrashing reserved for lucky clients of the President's most profitable division of all.
  Unfortunately, the Prez decided that "Operation Haircut" was far enough along that further delays in the interest of fiscal propriety were counter-productive and should therefore be ignored, and said Operation should proceed with or without consent from Agent 8771, or any other non-inebriated, semi-responsible entity, for that matter.
  Several easily corruptible Agents were called in to assist, and, in the tradition of all worthwhile accomplishments, bribed with vague promises and free intoxicants in exchange for hard labour and inhuman working conditions. A dependable supply chain of drugs, tacos, and chocolate bars was secured, and work progressed steadily despite near-zero visibility conditions as the roaches piled up and mountains of butts accrued on every available surface. Conversation became impossible as Agents' vocabularies were reduced to hoarse grunts and pointing motions that were largely indecipherable in the choking blue miasma.

Hand-painted stripes to really blow the budget...

  Eventually, a sort of reasonable-looking body was achieved, and painting was left to the now-nearly-vegetative President, who, despite the horrifying conditions of shop and self, managed to get most of the vehicle into a single shade of blue without collapsing on the hood, or just painting the wrong car altogether. Overall, by the standards of the Worst Shop in the Universe winner 8 years running, a pretty fair accomplishment, and noteworthy if only for a clear lack of moths, birds, and small rodents in the final finish.

Just "a few" things left to do...
  Eventually, Agent 8771 returned from his period of self-imposed exile, inevitably to discover to his horror that attempting to hide in the wilderness had only ensured that budgetary considerations had been completely abandoned in his absence, that his two hundred dollar junkyard piece-of-shit had been so thoroughly laboured upon as to be unrecognizeable, and, despite the monumental tab, the car was still completely dismantled and needing weeks of reassembly.
  Agent 8771 could not be reached for comment, having locked himself and his money-pit a safe distance away from the CWMC compound while he attempts to find some of the parts and scrape the "extra" primer off the vinyl top, etc.

Friday, July 29, 2011

President's Latest Dodge is so Rough that its Roughness Can only be Estimated by Mathematics Geniuses at Somewhere Around D=1.53

CWMC Headquarters, Ardrossan, Ab: When the famous mathematician Dr Benoit Mandelbrot published his research dealing with fractal geometry and the measuring of roughness, he probably could not have predicted the number of useful applications for his theories in the field of Rusty Dodges in Fields.

Dr. Mandelbrot: Car guy for sure
  The seemingly simple application of his principal idea, wherein, as z->z^2+C (where C is any complex number) is iterated, graphing the resultant numbers on the complex plane (imaginary #'s on the Y-axis) will yield insight into all of the wonders of nature, and give most of us a bit of a headache.
  The dangerous combination of a very little bit of knowledge and a lot of time to kill has served several sensational purposes at CWMC, not the least of which is finally allowing Agents to quickly assign relatively accurate measures of roughness (D) to be used for estimating purposes. The real advantage with this new system is a level of objectivity that was simply not possible before this important work was developed. Now, instead of saying "That Dodge is rough as fuck", we can more precisely and with substantially less subjectivity proclaim that said Dodge has in fact a D value of, say, 1.53, or slightly rougher than the Himilayas.
  The renowned math-nerd Agent 0311 was happy to elaborate on another seemingly contra-dictory situation, proposing that "When you try to actually measure the distance between the wheels, depending on the length of the ruler you use, you will find that the length of the rusty "coastline" that used to be the rocker panel has begun to approach infinity, which is substantially more than the original 118 inches, and will make reproduction panels difficult to source."

It even looks like rust.
   As followers of the work of Dr. Mandelbrot et al will happily point out, The number of iterations required to send the graph vertical to infinity determines the colour of the point outside the bounded region. If so, the peach and red two-toning on the Dodge would seem to indicate that the whole project is pretty far outside the boundaries of good taste, both fiscally and physically.
 The President, not altogether convinced of the validity of fractional dimensions as a coachbuilding consideration, took a second to  "...point out to that Mandelbrot fella that most of his important work in the field of randomized shittyness, or whatever, was achieved in the years prior to 1960, when Bondo technology was still in its infancy. These gains, together with previously unimaginable advances in recreational pharmacology, have rendered this Dodge a viable entity, as my master's thesis proposed in Big Ugly Bumpers and the Future of Nanny Statism, published in 1973. So fuck off."
  All Agents are encouraged to sign up for remedial math lessons with Agent 0311, provided he isn't too loaded to give a shit.