I agree with Murilee, though: that thing would be awesome with a WRX engine.

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They've got a lovely white 2001 Corolla S on there for $4300, and you start fantasizing about rolling up to the prestigious Nines hotel (they were looking for kitchen help a couple months ago) and asking the valet to "be nice" with your new toy, but the inevitable cackle lodges itself in the recesses of your memory banks and you're already unable to live it down. You need something with style, something with panache. You think, for some reason, you need something German.

You think, "the Germans are such excellent engineers, there's no way everything they build isn't bulletproof!" With this in mind, you find a sweet '97 Jetta with a five-speed. It seems like a good change of pace from Mom's Old Saturn, and besides you've always wanted something with a manual. With $4000 left over to replace the garish rims, lights, body kit, and "custom gauges", you think it's a great deal. Unfortunately some kid who'd just wrecked his '94 Integra-rri--so he called it--snatched it right out of your hands.

You need to do better. You can do better. You spend the entire night searching craigslist for better deals, but nothing's really catching your eyes.

Finally it's 4:45 in the morning, you've had at least a case of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and all the coffee in the world couldn't make you sane now. You see the words "Porsche 911" and immediately in your daze you can hear that flat six behind your back as you rip down the Coast Highway in your cocaine-white 911. You want. You want bad.

Hung over, you run do not walk to the nearest bus station and get the hell over to Mt Angel. You didn't think to contact the seller, but upon arriving you figure you can find the place okay. Mt Angel can't be that big, right?

As soon as you get off the bus, something seems to be drawing you in a vaguely northwesterly direction, and you figure it's as good as anything since you really don't know where to start. As you walk block upon block, past Starbucks and Burger King and Starbucks again, the draw becomes stronger and stronger, and eventually it becomes nearly impossible to overcome. You're fighting to stay at a walking pace and wondering why the wind isn't gusting in any other direction but this one. The realization that this may not have been in your best interests comes on and comes on strong, but after turning around you find that you can't actually walk in the opposite direction. The steady hurricane force wind pushes you onto your lanky bottom, and you begin to slide off the rough sidewalk into the middle of the street. You're stopped by a black Jetta parked in the middle of the street as regret hits you in the head with a sledgehammer, except that it was actually the fast-moving air slamming your face into the little VeeDub's side view mirror. There's nothing you can do but follow.

As you are pulled across front yards and through gardens you begin to notice that siding and shingles have come off of every house in the neighborhood. Parked cars devoid of hubcaps, then mirrors, then headlights, grilles, bumpers, and tires catch your attention, and as you move uncontrollably into back yards and through broken fences you notice that there aren't any cars parked anywhere at all. You come across the back yard of the one house in Mt Angel with a swimming pool and, luckily, you fall into the swimming pool. "I have family in southern Alabama," you think, "I know a thing or two about hurricane preparedness. Sink your furniture into the pool." You're safe. The worst is over.

Or so you think. The water level is getting lower and lower, and as you watch the rain fly sideways through the air you realize that it isn't rain at all. The pool water is being sucked along, and you soon flee the pool along with it. There's nothing you can do now. Empty backyards lead to no-roofed houses and eventually no houses at all.

You're slammed onto the concrete slab foundation where a lovely Tudor once stood, and you see in the distance a lone garage, still standing. You're moving at what must be thirty, forty miles an hour by now, and you begin to realize what you're being drawn to.

It's that garage. The one from the listing. You didn't recognize it without all the wood planks and construction equipment strewn across the front, but it's definitely the one. The previously clear sky is quickly closing in as the incredible wind pulls every raincloud in the Pacific Northwest to the singularity.

You see it. The "great deal" $4500 Porsche. It sits in the garage, calm, docile, white. Debris is flying by your head right now. An eight foot long piece of vinyl siding whizzes by your right ear and you can't believe what you see--it becomes nearly invisible before it's whisked into the gaping hole in the Porsche where a headlamp once resided.

As you accelerate exponentially with every house and car from Monitor to Gervais into the singularity you struggle to let out a scream, but all you can think is "I should have bought that Coro--"

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...by an apparently intoxicated/drunk/stoned photographer who is unsure precisely which way is up or where to aim the camera...

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But no, my friends, the real challenge posed by zose tricky Chermans is our inability to understand their fundamental concepts of wiring. If there is simple way to wire something up -- headlights, for instance -- they will go to the ends of the earth to avoid doing it that way. Why bother with a switch, a relay, and a fuse, when you can use two switches, twelve relays, three fuses, and enough wiring to go around the world twice? And why should, say, the heated seats be on a circuit by themselves, when they can be lumped in with the power window motors, the cruise control, the foglights and the rear defroster? That means that when one of them fails, you can take the opportunity to repair or replace all those systems at once. It saves you the hassle of having to do repairs to the defroster later -- in another ten years -- when that fails too. That's German efficiency, that is.

We North Americans, however, we've never really understood German efficiency. We appreciate it in our new cars, but let's face it, we're fat, lazy slobs, and we'd rather do things the easy way. Following a domestic car's wiring diagram isn't as complicated as trying to follow a single thread in a Persian rug, but slack-assed halfwits that we are, we like it that way. So if you're going to restore a Porsche, you're going to need to start with a clean slate. You want a project where you have the power to rebuild every part of the car, every system, every component. Sure, the junk-pile across-the-street Porsche sounds like a better deal at first, but you have to realize, it already runs! What good is that? That just means that someone's given you a head start, and you'll always have that slight feeling of inadequacy that you haven't done everything yourself. If you're undertaking a project, you want one with the highest ICR (Imhoff Countach Rating) you can get, and that one simply doesn't fit the bill.

Sure, with the hollow shell, you'll be forced to spend the better part of the rest of your life trying to track down all the parts you need. And we know most old 911 Turbo engines are already in use powering VW Bugboxes around the Nurburgring, but surely you'll eventually be able to find one. Somewhere. Maybe. Just think, when you finally do find all the parts, all you'll have to do is install them! Oh, and develop your own unique North-American style wiring system to connect all the components. How hard can that be? It's not like Porsche hired professionals to do it. And you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that eventually, some day, your great-great-great-great-great grandkids will be able to enjoy driving the Porsche that took so much of your blood and sweat, (no tears, though, crying's for pansies) once they strip out that engine you paid $12,000 for on eBay and convert it to the government-mandated cold fusion powerplant.

Because no project is truly complete until you can feel the satisfaction of a job well done. Even if you've been dead for several generations.

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