Excellent! You really don't need much of a theme with a car this great, but if you have time after you're done with the slightly ambitious build...

I'll try to get new stuff on MM.com every day, if possible. I've got some rants I never got around to writing for Jalopnik, stuff that would have brought in crappy traffic numbers there but might please all 17 of my devoted fans.

Actually, the novel was originally intended to be a total wank book (Torment was a big seller for them), but then I got my contract from London and they were going to pay me £100 less for it. So, I took my outline, de-pornified it to a certain extent, and now it's going to be the Great Hayward Street Racing Novel.

Since my years doing hard-copy shop manuals have prepared me to do all the prepress crap myself, I'll get it printed on the shittiest possible pulp paper and sell it myself. I'll make a PDF available for free e-book reading, of course, but I know all my stalkers will want the signed, numbered print editions.

Will you be working for Damon Lavrinc? He's a good guy... and an incredibly cruel LeMons judge.

Why can't I buy a Hairy Olds replica for 20 grand?

Also, when are we going to see the first 24 Hours of LeMons tattoo? You know it's coming!

This is heavier.

See, if the economy hadn't crashed and gas prices hadn't tripled, we'd all be driving Jake-brake-equipped monster pickups now.

Whaddya mean it's not worth selling the $4.50 parts on eBay? I sold everything off the Black Metal V8olvo, in order to stay within budget and still be able to buy stuff like Fiero wings and PA speakers for the Opeth. $2.75 for the owner's manual! $1.00 for the lock knobs!

Of course, now that I'm the one checking for cheating, I understand that you don't really need to squeeze theme-related stuff under the $500 budget.

It's probably the old Curta 'Peppermill' calculator that my grandfather used during his rally days of the late 1950s. Not only did his navigator use this thing for calculations in the ol' Porsche 356 and Saab 93, he used it at his desk when he went to his engineering day job (where it helped do the calculations that created the world's first aluminum beer-can-making machine).

Though sometimes I think it's the Don Prudhomme Childs & Albert connecting rod from Sears Point, circa 1995.