By now, everyone knows that the recently opened plaza is a beautiful pedestrian area, approximately 1.16 football fields in size, in the heart of beautiful downtown Regina. Here are several more facts that you may not know.
1. With its rusty girders and snaky aluminum weave “shade screens,” the plaza is built to accommodate the return of the inland ocean to southern Saskatchewan. It is not certain whether the city planners have access to a “time window” or an actual portal to a time when the seas rise and claim the plains once more. When reached for comment, the city would only say that “ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
2. Before the city laid down the 345,000 paving stones that make the plaza so distinctive, City Council members took Sharpies and scribbled the dreams of orphaned children on the bottom of each one of those crazy little bricks. No one knows why they did this, but soon afterwards, Michael Fougere grew five years younger at a Public Works Committee meeting, and Louis Browne suddenly got a recording contract.
3. The ceramic planters lining the traffic lanes were originally supposed to be spring-loaded rubber pinball bumpers in order to make the downtown feel more like a candy-coloured carnival of caroming death. The plan was dropped for budgetary reasons.
4. If you leave your old razor blades in the centre of the plaza after work, they’ll be sharp and shiny by morning!
5. The plaza is built over the intersection of mystical ley lines which generate massive amounts of geo-chthonic power. As soon the city figures out the eldritch magicks to plug that shit into the grid, we’ll be sitting pretty. SaskPower needs to hire some competent druids first, though. Write your MLA! No, don’t.
6. It’s super hard to sell meth on that plaza with those bricks reflecting all that f***ing sunlight in your eyes.
7. The daring, organic public sculpture lining the plaza is excellent at obscuring the heritage architecture along the north side of the street. City planners have done this to make sure Reginans don’t accidentally glance at anything appealing to the eye while enjoying their plaza time.
8. If you venture out onto the plaza on a cloudless night with the moon full, you’ll get the best possible view of someone running out of Victoria Park and stabbing you.
9. Those bewildering light posts are the only visible component of a gigantic artificial intelligence that lurks beneath the city and secretly runs our lives. On election night, the mayor-elect must enter the plaza alone and absorb the AI’s knowledge and wisdom. The amount of information is so vast that the mayor must don a feathery, mullet-shaped cybernetic helmet to hold it all.