New Cold Storage Bunker Hailed by Critics

C.W.M.C. Headquarters, Ardrossan, Ab: Pundits are positively priapic over the latest addition to the President's empire of empty materialism. Architectural Digest magazine is calling the new Cold Storage Bunker #3 "A breathtaking achievement; conceived and constructed without compromise... a new standard of superiority in all facets of its design and execution."

  The new structure, reverently referred to as the CSBIII amongst the privileged few to have glimpsed its glorious facade, has only recently been unveiled to stunned audiences worldwide, prompting breathless, gushing hyperbole from all who have witnessed the first great architectural masterpiece of the 21st century.

  As you approach the imposing main entrance, you are struck by the setting; mountains of used tires, dead motorcycles, and twisted panels frame your vision, creating a tranquil, yet awe-inspiring promenade for visitors and Agents alike. How many hours did (two) men labour to create such beauty? The mind can scarcely grasp the sheer audacity of the concept, much less comprehend the absolute numbers: almost two hundred 2x6x10s, forty-five sheets of the finest 7/16" OSB, imported from Hinton, four, yes, four windows of the finest quality that could be had for free, twenty-eight sheets of steel roofing panels acquired in an epic journey to the far Eastern Hutterite colony in Holden; the list goes on, each item more outrageous than the last. Literally thousands of the cheapest finest nails were sacrificed to this great project; the final cost of this heroic monument to one man's car-storage vision is likely to be in the thousands of dollars, but actual costs may never be known due to the, shall we say, imprecise nature of the CWMC Accounting Division's, er, accounting.

  While the President basks in the accolades of the worlds press, one slightly worrying fact is becoming apparent: it's already full. Full, that is, of enough rusty rubbish to occupy the careers of three generations of welders, preppers, and painters.

  "Well, I'll just build another one." said a glazed-looking President today in an interview from the Taco Bell parking lot in Lacombe, where he was seen wrestling seagulls for discarded enchilada wrappers in an attempt to cut costs after the latest round of funding requisitions was denied by friends and family alike.

  "Food is pricey these days, but indoor parking is priceless."

  All agents are encouraged to avoid HQ for the next couple of weeks as the President, desperate for funding, has resorted to Delorean-esque tactics like selling off his shitty home-grown weed at $2300.00/oz. 

$49.95 GT Hood Stripe Special Held Over due to Huge Demand

C.W.M.C. Paint & Body Division, Ardrossan, Ab: As the sun sets on another sizzling summer, the Agents-only GT Hood Stripe Special offer has been held over to try to accomodate the tremendous demand for parallel black stripes on the hoods of all Agency Cruisers. Making GT Hood Stripes a mandatory requirement for Special Agent status has no doubt helped the President line up the work, even if so far the majority of the cars so decorated are actually his own.

  Agent 0842, having just recently enlisted the services of the P&B Division to chop a huge hole in the hood of his mint, all original 1966 Mustang convertible and apply a decidedly not-factory hood scoop, decided to go the extra mile and totally offend the local Mustang-nerd fraternity by letting the Presidents favorite division dream up a completely inaccurate set of stripes for the yellow Cruiser.

  "This is an outrage," said Edgar "The Pony" Crashworthy, V.P. of the local Mustang Nitpickers Association; "We will not stand by and watch this terrible company desecrate our Mustangs with this kind of nonsense." He then returned to detailing his beloved 'Stang, polishing the overspray on the frame rails; oblivious to the water pouring in through the rusty cowl vents.

  Agent 0842 says he likes the look of his new stripes and scoop package, but he is getting tired of waking up to find threatening letters in his mail box and burning effigies of himself and his "ruined" convertible on the front lawn.
  All Agents are encouraged to get in on this sweet deal before the President starts to sober up and realizes that he is losing about $378.00 on each set of stripes. Plus taxes.

Inventory Control Policy Another Disappointing Failure

CWMC Compound, Ardrossan, Ab: Following a 10-year program of inventory acquisition and retention (read "hoarding"), the management at CWMC have attempted to introduce radical new guidelines for inventory control, only to be met again with strong resistance from all Agents, and, ultimately, abject failure.

  Despite some honest effort on behalf of the ever-cooperative President, he has several times in the last number of weeks been unable to control the need to acquire bargain-basement "classics" and park them haphazardly around the CWMC compound. Perhaps the most glaring example of this pro-inventory mindset has arrived in the form of another half-dozen outboard motors of various lineages and vintages, all non-op and without any obvious practical applications, as there is no actual boat upon which to affix any of them, were they even tangibly functional.

  Agent 8771 cannot be excluded from the proverbial shit list, either, having recently added multiple units to the sizeable pile of half-dead "antique" snowmobiles that decorate the compound, scattered randomly about wherever they quit running last year. The CWMC equivalent of man-made reefs are providing comfortable seating for visitors, and welcome nesting areas for local rodentia.

  Perhaps the most vexing of all is the President's own penchant for castoff classics, arriving unannounced and immobile; mute testimony to the car-collecting sickness that apparently has no cure, and only limited treatment potential. The much-anticipated departure of the 1959 Mercedes 190D has been more than made up for with the arrival of a 1952 Hudson, dilapidated in extremis and with no realistic plan to resuscitate. Vague, incoherent talk of "getting it on the road" seems far-fetched at best, as the lineup of similar jalopies with similar half-baked schemes is long and expensive.



French dog with American one.



  The final insult to the now- totally-failed Inventory Control Policy has to be the appear -ance of a 1970 Chevrolet Bel-Air sedan. Agent 1080 is so upset by the purchase of CWMC's first and only GM vehicle that he has locked himself in his Aspen and refuses to speak to anyone. A hunger strike is being conducted, but the stacks of pizza boxes outside the car window are tending to blunt the impact of the protest. Agent 4261, on the other hand, is ready to detail the old Chev to within an inch of its scruffy life, and is lobbying convincingly for a fleet of Presidential Battle Cruisers that don't stall in the rain.

  "I just like stuff, I guess..." said the President today in an interview from the new $6000.00 garage he has erected to keep $63.00 worth of cars out of the weather.

  All Agents are encouraged to visit the CWMC Compound and try their luck at starting any of these latest projects.

 Then steal something. Bring a trailer.

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.

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.

Operation Yard Ornament II Underway

CWMC HQ, Ardrossan, Ab.: Still slightly shaken by the narrowness of last summer's victory at the annual LBT Concours de Corrosion, the President is taking no chances this year as the "Western Canada's Worst Car" showdown looms large on the August horizon.



Find the bigger dog...



  Finding a suitable entry for this most exclusive and hotly contested event of the summer drinking season is not an assignment for a novice Agent; only the most experienced (red) eyes will know when they are looking at a potential winner, and not just another run-of-the-mill piece of shit that no one will remember by the third round of burgers and bong hits.

  "It should look as though it has actually passed through the ass of a dog at some point in the recent past." said the President earlier today when he was asked what he looked for in a WCWC entry. "Choosing an undesireable body style is a must, as is a gross colour. It also doesn't hurt if the car has always been regarded as a freakish, ugly abortion, even from new."

  With that kind of a shopping list in hand, it didn't take long to narrow down the ol' classified ads to just a single page: 1962 Plymouth, 4 door sedan, beige. Left outside for many years. Some assembly req. Sold!



Many other cars actually look better when assembled



  When the remains of the unit actually arrived at the CWMC compound, there was some concern as to whether the pile of rusty shit on the trailer was actually a car. Figuring that victory could slip away if the car was too rancid to be recognized, the President has embarked on something of a reassembly Operation, randomly affixing pieces of trim to the vehicle while staying drunk enough not to get too concerned with the actual locations and fit of the large pile of stainless strips, rusty chrome-plated rocket-blaster taillight housings, bent, jangly emblems, pitted aluminum mouldings, and push-button shifter parts scattered randomly around the general area of concern.

  Plans to have Operation Yard Ornament II roadworthy have been shelved indefinitely, but all vehicles must arrive at the LBT Compound under their own steam, so some kind of slant-six transplant has to take place in order to return the Plymouth to auto-mobile status.

If we can imagine the President pulling this together in a reasonable aount of time, we could also suppose he might attempt to install some seats, get the doors to open, or maybe try putting some brakes together just for the hell of it.

  "While the '62 Belvedere does fill a gap in the CWMC Plymouth collection, sometimes a gap just looks better..." said Agent 533 today in a brief phone interview that left this reporter a bit needing a drink. "Sure, its got low miles, but so does the Titanic".

  All Agents are encouraged to report to HQ to assist in the final prep and detailing, which may or may not include rebuilding the transmission, engine, brakes and steering.

0313: The Beetles and the Damage Done

Quiet Brainy-Lefty Southside Street, Edmonton: With their territory shrunk to tiny areas surrounding universities, libraries, and walking-pace retirement parks, Volkswagen Beetles are becoming scarcer than ever, and most normal citizens are okay with that. Years of encroachment by Japanese subcompacts sporting actual heater/defrosters has left Beetle ownership to the few delusional, masochistic, subversive socialist/socialites who prize the intangible middle-fingerness of the original anti-car above all.

   None of this optimistic post-war hippie idealism seems to have yet yeilded a successful rust-prevention policy, however, and most Beetle-ists seem to have reverted to Birkenstocks, bicycles, or BMWs for actual transportation, leaving their floorless bugs to adorn yards and alleys; sometimes under tarps, always under the weather, and usually well past the point of no return; running boards dragging and crispy R.E.M. tapes cooking on top of the dash.

   So it was probably with a mild sense nostalgia lightly flavoured with undercurrents of slight irritation that 0313s neighbours awoke to the choppy, chainsaws-over-Chopin rasp of one of Edmontons last aircooled lawyers (911 owners excluded, of course) attempting the drive to the office. 

  Unencumbered by any conventional sense of normality, Agents 0311 and 0313 have seen their fair share of Beetle-bullshit over the course of their little romance, and Agent 0313 has run through her share of the things; currently inflicting some light neglect upon a later model red example. The President, just having purchased Plymouth #7, is unable to offer defensible criticism of a policy of purchasing multiple examples of the same car, and therefore powerless to withold Full Presidential Approval, even though some of the individual examples themselves would have been called into question over possible violations of Code 7-11 in the Agency Handbook Re: Permissible Maximum Diameters of Floor Perforations due to Rust: Section A; Chapter 14 of Ferdinand's Letter to the County Zoning Board, verses four through thirty-nine: "If thine love be true, don't let her fall through". Jesus wept. Amen.



The more graceful solution is always worth the extra effort.



  Agent 0311, flush with the success of "Operation Snowball", was eager to dive deep into the tarry, rusty guts of this latest double-feature horror-thon, and wasted no time (well, actually, a pretty fair-sized bit of time, truth be told) getting down to some serious structural renovations. The results speak for themselves; another triumph for 0311's inimitable form-follows-function aesthetic. The parts themselves are sculpture, achingly beautiful; each piece poised, as though ready to leap into flight at any moment. Breathtaking as usual, and a real crime to hide such beauty beneath a carpet. Such is the legendary modesty of the great master 0311; we are humbled in your presence, sir.

  All Agents are being encouraged to carry extra tow ropes and jumper cables for the duration of the summer months, as Agent 0313 will be at large in the Edmonton area. Watch this space for timely updates and remember to set your clocks back 4 hours on Wednesday, just for the fuck of it.