Friday, April 8, 2011

Super Secret Headquarters Plans and Request for Advice

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 1: Scale model of a Secret Headquarters/Lair, exterior




                                              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

                                          Fig 7:  It's called "a dual-use facility," folks -- feed the
                                          homeless and the team/minions.

...and give grants to restore historic sites -- http://www.ehow.com/how_4519084_grants-restore-old-buildings.html

                                          Fig 8: Historic Fort Secret Headquarters

But I really have no idea how to do this stuff.

Help.



                                                       
(EDIT - Parts of this blog just keep disappearing for some reason.  It probably has to do with the government shutdown.  Anyway, I'm tired of trying to fix it.)