Jarvis DeBerry

If you thought 2012 was a strange year for us Earthlings - what with the demonization of hooded sweatshirts, the prediction of humanity's demise and Republican candidate Newt Gingrich running on moon colonies and back-and-forth trips to Mars - it was crazier still in Bizarro World. You DC Comics fans know Bizarro World. It's the place where folks do everything we do, but backwards. It's hard to conceive of the stuff that goes on there.

For example, in their second month of the year, folks on that planet had a he-said/he-dead shooting similar yet completely opposite to the one in Sanford, Fla., where 28-year-old George Zimmerman killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Just like here, police assigned the victim and the gunman to different racial categories: black and white. But there the victim was white. That's right. Police arrived on the scene to find a black teenager, smoking gun in hand, standing over the body of a dead white man.

Down here, a suspect fitting that description and in those circumstances would know to assume the position, but this teenager didn't fold. He stood his ground. And in keeping with their policy against jumping to conclusions, detectives on the scene kindly asked him to explain to them what had transpired.

This is what he said: "I was walking home, minding my own business, when this guy," he pointed at the blood-soaked body on the ground, "ran me down. I didn't know what he might do, but it was dark, I was scared, and he put his hands on me. Don't I have the right to defend myself? So I took his gun from him. Shot him with it."

The officers all made eye contact with one another. "You believe this guy?" one cop said. And would you believe it, but yes! They all believed him! Slapped him on the back and wished him a good night. They didn't investigate or make an arrest. Why? The kid said he was innocent. The victim couldn't contradict him. Case closed.

Later the news broke that the teenager may have previously smoked marijuana, but nobody held that against him or even considered it relevant. Because young folks were considered more likely to make mistakes, they were the ones to whom police showed the most leniency.

No tolerance, though, for middle-age folks. In fact, police stopped and frisked untold thousands of patrons walking toward that world's Festival of Jazz and shook their cargo shorts free of joints. What a sight that was: sunburned geezers splayed out over the hoods of the police cars before being frogmarched into paddy wagons and summarily convicted of crimes. The convictions cost them their jobs and made it impossible for them to get hired for new ones.

Actually, the folks on the backwards planet didn't do everything consistently. There were some places there where government officials decided to treat those who abused drugs and not jail them. Hey, I told you you wouldn't believe this place. Here in the jailingnest state in the jailingnest nation on Earth, it's hard to conceive of a place where people aren't locked up for getting high.

Nothing gets a man locked up quicker on Bizarro World than attacking a woman. In fact, the commissioner of their most violent and popular game sprang to action when it was shown to him that two-thirds of the teams in his league employed a man who'd been arrested for domestic violence or sexual assault. He suspended all the players involved and made their teams pay a hefty fine for hiring them in the first place. It made the league look bad, the commissioner said in a statement.

"This type of conduct will not be tolerated. We have made significant progress in changing the culture, and we are not going to relent. We have more work to do and we will do it." The commissioner said turning a blind eye to such crimes could lead to someone romantically involved with one of his players getting killed.

And one really ought to be about decreasing the frequency and agony of death. Consequently, the move there to make sure everybody had access to quality health care was met with unanimous approval. No governors refused money for the sick to keep himself ideologically pure. None of the officials with health care policy experience slashed mental health services. Nor did any decide to stop the government from paying for hospice.

The pair took on the big guys of the big-buck restoration business when they began the lengthy and painstaking restoration of the 1933 Alfa Romeo SC 1750 GS Coupe by Figoni for owners David and Adele Cohen of West Vancouver, and were rewarded by seeing it re-emerge on to the world’s classic car stage with an impressive impact.

The Alfa’s first appearance wowed the crowd and judges at Italy’s Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este in May, where it scored a Best in Show triple, winning the Coppa d’Oro, Trofeo BMW Group and Villa Erba awards plus The Art of Streamlining class trophy. A few months later, at the prestigious Pebble Beach concours in California, it was a best in show nominee, won the Most Elegant Sports Car and European Sports Racing classes and the Road & Track trophy.

Responsible for this remarkable return to the glittering concours arena by the Alfa – its first public appearance was the Paris Salon of 1933 – are Mike Taylor and Ian Davey of RX Autoworks in North Vancouver.

“It’s the highlight of our career so far,” says Taylor of the Alfa, and the partnership that began when a 14-year-old Davey moved from Ontario to Vancouver 34 years ago. “We started out with bicycles, go-karts and then cars. Back then, that meant 1970s Japanese cars, which you could pick up for a couple of hundred dollars.”

Taylor had access to a garage and tools and the pair “hung out together” learning how fix them, aided by various high school shop courses.

They perfected their skills in various automotive jobs, but spent their free time in a three-car garage rented for their own projects in the late 1980s, where they soon found their talents in demand. “People would see us working on our cars and say, ‘Hey, I need that done’ and that’s how it started.”

The pair decided from day one that, “if we were going to do a job, we were going to do it right.” And that philosophy soon saw a 1970s Alfa Romeo GTV pass through their hands, followed by a customer “who took a real leap of faith” and turned over a Jaguar XK120 to their care. “It was a very rusty car,” recalls Taylor. “But repairing rust was our specialty after all those Japanese cars.” Rebuilt from the tires up, the Jag went on to win “all sorts of awards” for its owner, and new customers for RX Autoworks.

Restoring various Austin-Healeys and E-Type Jags soon evolved into the classic cars of the 1930s that are now its focus. “Restoration is an expensive process, and you need to have the value in the car at the end of it. You don’t generally want to be doing your Bugeye Sprite to the level we do it,” says Taylor, although they won’t turn you away if you want to.