I would appreciate your help, input, advice, etc on something.
Objective: to live in a super fabulous, flamboyant, and way over the top secret headquarters/lair in or near the city of Los Angeles by the end of the year 2013.
Ideally this super fabulous, flamboyant, and way over the top secret headquarters/lair in or near the city of Los Angeles would include:
1. An array of bleeping computers, reel-to-reel tape players, and other sophisticated machinery
2. A really cool looking table with monogrammed seats for the folks who lived there and a gigantic map of the world covering most of the wall behind it.
3. Tesla coil.
4. Etc. You basically know what a lair is if you’ve ever seen a James Bond movie or watched an episode of the Superfriends.
Fig 2: Artist's Rendition of Hypothetical Lair Interior
Fig 3: Scale Model of Hypothetical Command Center
What I’m confident I can do is find a big house, other people to share the rent with me, and set up shop with minimal (but noticeable) difficulty.
Fig 4: Miniature model of a Big House
But I'd really like to come up with something a little cooler, more ambitious, and more bizarre than that.
So I’m soliciting advice.
My favorite fantasy involves buying an abandoned offshore oil rig and converting it into a complex that would have stuff like a gym, kitchen, living space, etc and would be a place to live, a homeless shelter, maybe rent out practice areas to bands, low cost and very basic hotel type rooms for low income transients... a lot of stuff.http://www.designbuzz.com/entry/abandoned-oil-rigs-shaped-up-as-living-hub-with-underwater-research-labs/#
Fig 5: Abandoned BP Oil Rig
Of course there’s the issue of everyone commuting to the lair by boat and having to lease a parking spot and wharf space…
My next favorite fantasy involves getting some land and turning it into a trailer park complex that's pretty much the same thing -- as it expands just add more mobile homes. I like this because it’s sort of like what a military camp is initially set up like and it supports the notion of gradual growth and all that. However, it also seems a little trashy, you know? It’d be a trailer park, after all, and being able to simultaneously refer to it as a “gated community” wouldn’t help much.
Fig 6: One Vision for an Economical Lair
And then there's all kinds of abandoned stuff like factories, warehouses, asylums, prisons, hospitals, etc, the idea being to combine a place to live, a business, and a non-profit all in one little complex run by whoever wanted to be involved.
Now the government will apparently provide financial assistance to people to start homeless shelters -- http://www.ehow.com/how_5530676_start-nonprofit-homeless-shelter.html
homeless and the team/minions.
...and give grants to restore historic sites -- http://www.ehow.com/how_4519084_grants-restore-old-buildings.html
But I really have no idea how to do this stuff.
Help.
Help.