We all love the mythology of Area 51 and all, but when it comes to great exercises in pop-cultural paranoia, secret bases in the desert and under ground skunkworks lose out to... New York City. Our home for the past few days, as we take in the New York Auto Show. Whenever we're here and thinking about, you know, black-helicopter/freelance army-type conspiracies, we're reminded of Three Days of the Condor, Marathon Man, and of course, Men in Black. The Jalopnik commenters, who have been working overtime the past few days, also think these thoughts, of shadowy para-entities and their nefarious doings. And some transform these thoughts into...well, let's call it "inspired paranoid narrative."
Our COTD goes to... Lascauxcaveman, who spun this yarn—a magnum opus, really—out of Murilee's DOTS post on the Porsche 912:
Murilee - since your own fiction includes heaping helpings of the goofy and perverse, maybe you should consider your case for the basis of a novel:
A Pynchonesqe tale of a harmlessly eccentric gearhead slacker who gets his kicks photographing old cars on the neighborhood streets of an unnamed northern California town, and gets noticed shooting snaps of a nice '69 Charger - hours before it gets stolen.
A quirky, brilliant, psychologically-tilted, Camus-quoting automaton of a cop gets assigned to the case and after arresting our hero (who, due to a clerical error, is minutes away from being water-boarded by C.I.A. agents), realizes the real culprits can be seen in the murky background of one of his photos. This turns out to be their first lead in infiltrating a shadowy international drugs n' carjacking n' stolen antiquities ring involving a psychotic doomsday society (modeled on the creepier elements of both the Masons and Opus Dei) and a elite army of underage kidnapped Asian hookers who have rebelled against their captors/pimps, secretly led by a charismatic bass-playing former 60's radical bombmaker who has ostensibly retired to Berkely to be a social worker.
All this tortuously leads up to an unlikely cataclysmic battle scene climax ambiguously involving space aliens - or perhaps fake covert U.S. federal government space aliens- plotting to throw a monkeywrench into a feverishly rumored 7-way merger of Boeing, Airbus, GM, the Republic of Uruguay, Exxon, Apple Computer, and FritoLay - taking place at the base of the Coit Tower (or maybe the Transamerica building; gotta work pyramids into the story somehow).
Sort of a V. meets Gone in 60 Seconds by way of Vineland and/or Still Life with Woodpecker.
If it comes to the big screen, I got dibs on the Pig Bodine cameo.
We'd buy the book and see the movie.