#Sparks Street

[lindaseccaspina]

Gowan this, and Gowan that; Gowan here and Gowan there. -- Gowan's Opera House

Gowan this, and Gowan that; Gowan here and Gowan there. — Gowan’s Opera House

  Former Gowan’s Music Hall History of building Saturday Shopping: Orme’s Piano Store at 189 Sparks Street, in 1897. Awesome carriage on the right. But I particularly like the J.P. Curry “express” wagon on the left. Some things are never Lost. The store was named after J. L. Orme, a Scottish immigrant who arrived in Canada in 1856. He became the first paid organist at St. Andrew Presbyterian…

[kingkatsuki]

Imagine Dynamight going to a school to be interviewed by the little children there, sitting down in one of the chairs in their classroom that is far too small for his hulking form but he sits down in it without complaint as the kids sit down in front of him with crossed legs.

And he loves it, because they have no filter— just like him, and they end up asking him the most blunt questions without hesitation. And some of the questions he’d never usually answer if they were coming from broadcasters or reporters, but he can’t lie to these kids so he keeps responding openly and honestly.

Even when one of the little girls asks “Mister Dynamight, do you have a girlfriend?”

It’s a rumour that’s been circulating for months as the media try to work out who the mysterious woman is in his life (if there even is one!) and it’s confirmed immediately when Bakugou answers with a, “Yeah, I do.”

And as his PR manager is having a meltdown in the corner, Bakugou’s grin is wide when the little boys in the room sound out a simultaneous chorus of “ewwwwwww”

[lesbianralzarek]

still laughing over that one time someone took "rakdos cultists do a lot of blue collar and pink collar labor as their day jobs" to mean "preschool teachers and all other traditionally feminine jobs are usually performed by cultists who have dedicated their lives in service to the demon lord of chaos and riots" instead of the very obvious "those in charge of the entertainment sector who act as a release valve to a pressure cooker police state do sex work". they operate brothels and organize orgies. its, like, explicitly stated in canon? repeatedly?

brb, dropping my toddler off at murder clown daycare because i forgot that adult theatre actors perform labor and prostitution is a real career that exists in every society ever, and a setting like ravnica isnt complete without an answer to the question "where is the sex industry?"

[archeolatry]

So there was a point in my work life when Ron Mael was my mortal enemy archnemesis. True story.

I used to work at a famous arthouse theater in West LA from about 2002 until ‘08-’09, when I moved up at another theater in the chain. Even then I was often called in to pinch-hit when the famous place was expecting a film to be busy or if they needed someone between new hires. (I left the company at the end of 2015.)

One of the downsides to working there was that parking was pretty terrible. The theater itself was built in the 1920s, and the street to the east of it was almost all apartments. Most of those were built from the ‘40s up until the ‘60s, so they were largely street parking only. Not to mention the fact that the street on the west side of the theater was getting busier-- hipster boutiques and Pan-Asian eateries had started popping up a few blocks down the road from us. (IYKYK.)

So the employees of the theater, the video store, and the less-hip restaurants next to the main drag all had to compete with customers of said businesses —as well as those of the used bookstore— for the handful of double-stacked spaces in the back alley. The best space was the fairly generous single spot by the dumpster. You weren’t gonna get towed because you blocked someone in, or get blocked in yourself, or risk your car’s bumper by parking in the other, shorter single space by the freeway on-ramp; you could simply just park your car and forget about it until your shift was over- no need to play musical chairs. And if your shift ended after midnight and you had the day’s cash earnings stuffed in your jacket to deposit at the bank, the closeness of the spot was optimal.

That is all to say that the dumpster spot was hot property.

Cue the Black Volkswagen Thing.

(I marked The Thing even then because a member of the theater’s Rocky Horror cast also owned a Volkswagen Thing, though his was white. I thought it funny that two of the same rare car* should converge in this one place, often on the same day.)

The Thing did not belong to the theater staff. It did not belong to the video store staff. (I asked.) It did not belong to the staff of the used bookstore, who had three dedicated spots and never had enough customers to need more than two employees at a time**. (It might have belonged to one of the restaurants, but we hadn’t the Spanish nor Arabic skills to ask.) Nevertheless, The Thing was parked in the dumpster spot at some point during almost every weekend, and it would be there at the worst possible time.

It seemed that I could rarely beat The Thing to the coveted space no matter how early I got there. Maybe if I showed up before 4. But very often between 4:30 and 5:55, The Thing was there. Sometimes I stuck my head out the back door during a shift to see if the space was free. If it wasn’t, it was because a car had parked there after The Thing had left. And sometimes The Thing had the audacity to take up the other single spot to the same result. It seemed The Thing existed entirely to spot-block me.

Then one day, while I was attempting to park, I saw a man coming from the bookstore towards the lot. It was Boss Accountant***.

Boss Accountant was a lithe man with a stern face and plastered hair that was too black for his age; he usually dressed in a crisp white shirt and tie with proper trousers, and seemed like he was on his lunch break from an accounting firm despite it being the weekend. He looked like the boss battle in a video game where you had to fight your way through an office building; the final accountant you had to beat to level up. I had seen him at the bookstore more than once.

I put my car into park —hazard lights on— waiting to see which spot would be freed up.

Boss Accountant was approaching The Thing.

A customer! It was a customer that had been spot-blocking me! Not even one of my fellow workers there for a six-hour haul, but someone there for a capricious ninety minutes at best. And a customer of the stuffy bookstore to boot. Clearly not deserving of the coveted spot.

I glared at him beneath my sunglasses while he took his sweet time getting there. I tried not to begrudge the old man, BUT…!

My fingers drummed irritably against the steering wheel. This fucker. I inched slightly closer as he got in the car. The spot was MINE gatdammit and no one else was gonna come along and take it.

Finally, after an irritably long time (and probably him figuring out that I wasn’t a crazed fan trying to box him in but someone gunning for the coveted parking space) the backup lights came on. I reversed. He pulled out and drove away. I pulled in, triumphant. Spot-blocked no more! At least, not on that day. In my own mind, I had tangled with The Thing and won. (I was like 23 and undiagnosed, bruh- go easy on me here.)

Then one day the dumpster spot got painted off as disabled parking, and the dumpsters were moved to the other single spot, leaving us all to fend for ourselves in the double-stack and on the street.

I’m unsure what year this all took place, and I didn’t know (at the time) what had become of Boss Accountant and The Thing, since I saw less of them after that. Thinking back, it was probably promo and touring for Hello Young Lovers or 21x21/Exotic Creatures... that took him/it away. My moving to the other theater made the point moot anyway. (It’s definitely moot now as the bookstore was razed for a new-build apartment sometime in 2016. The new building does not have its own parking garage.)

However, enough time had passed that I didn’t recognize Boss Accountant when I sold him a ticket for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg during a slow weekend matinee in 2014. Pleasant demeanor. Polite smile. Crisp shirt, too-black plastered hair. Didn’t order concessions, didn’t dwell in the lobby but went right into the theater. The old man was surely out of earshot when my manager looked over at me. “Do you have any idea who that was?”

“No.”

“That was Ron Mael from Sparks.”

“Who?”

---

Thank goodness I watched The Sparks Brothers at home on Netflix, cuz when I saw that car I about lost my gatdamn mind.

*J, the Rocky Horror guy, told me they were rare. Looking up info now, I see that less than 30k of them were made for the North American market, and they were only sold in the US from 1973-74. A 2017 report from an informal registry of Thing owners estimates around 5k of them still exist today in the entire US. Weird, right?

**The bookstore itself was highly curated and had the mid-century Spartan sparseness of a Bell Telephone Laboratories office. I didn’t care for it much; it was too hoity-toity and tended to eschew paperbacks even of Very Good Books for rare or collectible hardcovers. It wasn’t particularly welcoming, and didn’t even really have much of an Old Book Smell. But in the days before The Pocket Internet, employees were allowed to read while the film played, and sometimes you just needed a New And/Or Different Book. ***This addition is about 75 notes too late, but I felt the need to clarify. We had lots of 'recurring characters' that we ended up giving Sex and the City-style names to, as one often does in a service environment. We had a man we called Large Diet because, through physical or mental impairment, those were the only words he would/could croak out like some bizarro Pokémon (tho he later added "Thanks."). We had a man -whose real name I learned but forgot- that we called Lincoln because he had a chinstrap beard. (He was Lincolnesque in no other way. He was of average height, pudgy, and of a merry sort of disposition.) So, naturally, the man from bookstore got himself a moniker just for sticking out, despite the fact that we never spoke and only Acknowledged Each Other With A Nod In That Way White People Do For Some Reason. (You know what I mean.)

[rowanisawriter]

hmmm i am accepting this new information in a completely rational and adult way

[insomniaccoffeebean]

I'm back on my Jason Todd bulshit.

So here you have babay Jason Todd art.

The lighting a little weird but deal with it.

(Yes, the graffiti behind his head actually spells stuff, i promise, and I actually thought a lot about it, it's not much but I actually a surprisinf amount of world building went into this piece)

[cosmics-beings]

Drift making stickers, banners, shirts, just to make sure EVERYONE knows he’s the one responsible for the bitlets growing inside Ratchet (and his conjunx also growing grumpiness).

Drift, wearing a shirt: I’ve sparked my conjunx

Rodimus, wearing a shirt: my amica sparked his conjunx

Ratchet, unwillingly wearing a shirt: my conjunx sparked me

I want (and still plan to) draw this and even write this so bad. i wanted to draw it this week but my job got in the way T-T but I'm also saving this so i can draw them because them all in their T-Shirts would be so funny.

I can just imagine drift and rodimus being so damn chummy and laughing, and then ratchet is moping on the side. not only because he was forced to wear a shirt that basically screamed he got fucked side-ways, on the counter, on the floor, on the wall, etc., my drift, but he is so grumpy too. he is so damn grumpy like he has an attitude, the sparklings are probably gonna come out with one.

Like they take a family picture, especially for the sparkling shower, and it's ridiculous. I mean, Rodimus and Drift have a good time. Ratchet is a mixture of tired and stressed because he has a million surgeries to conduct--tho Drift won't let him do that. He wants his conjunx to rest.

also trivia but my dratchet sparklings actually don't look like ratchet. none of them look like him, they all favor drift at different stages in his life. however, they do actually have healing abilities. like they are outliers and all their outlier ability is to heal, though one's is to take life away with her touch. she becomes a doctor however and is as good as ratchet. Also adkjfaj Ratchet is still a doctor at that time.

Drift and Ratchet in my aus never actually stop having children so i cannot cap it. Like yeah we know in LL Ratchet dies but I've explained how he's still alive in my aus even after that and guess what...they go right back to having children. Ratchet always carries because in my aus personally, Drift has trauma with carrying because of things that happened in his past. He actually got his forge tank/valve removed. Originally, Rathcet wouldn't have cared to sire or anything, like he expected that's how it would be with he and Drift but Drift is very serious about being a sire.

[nobeerreviews]

Sometimes you have to be apart from people you love, but that doesn't make you love them any less. Sometimes you love them more.

-- Nicholas Sparks

(Regensburg, Germany)

[flameleads]

"Great, another Homunculus."

[beforevenice]

Don’t take my advice. Or anyone’s advice. Trust yourself. For good or for bad, happy or unhappy, it’s your life, and what you do with it has always been entirely up to you.

// Nicholas Sparks

[radracer]

1983 Dodge Shelby Charger SCCA

[lindaseccaspina]

Mary Theresa Scissons Liberty from Almonte and the The C. Ross Company Ottawa

The Ottawa Citizen -1976 Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • Sat, Nov 20, 1976 Page 51 — Mary Cook  Mary Theresa Liberty feels there must be something God wants her to do with her life, “or else He wouldn’t have kept me around for so long.” Now 91, she has spent more than 80 years at the same Singer sewing machine, which is older than she is and even today gets almost constant use. Mrs. Liberty is a…

[velvetjune]

I love the change of the subway station repeating endlessly after Alan completes the ritual and parliament tower appears

I also went through the map immediately after taking those photos lol

[andrewdi8]

Amid the quiet, subtle signs of life flicker like neon beacons, whispering of untold stories and echoes of laughter in empty streets.

The city may seem dormant, yet with each glimmer it reminds us: resilience runs deep and the spark of life is never fully extinguished.

Neon lights pierce through the fog, hinting at life just beneath the surface. In quiet corners, something grows, something holds on.

This isn't the end, it's simply the waiting 🌿

...

[candytuft-whimsing]

I found this reference on pinterest and smth possessed me

Finished version

[chrysanthemumteapot11]

I'm going to make a full-on Varigo + Taylor Swift analysis post with song lyrics eventually, but I physically cannot scroll through hundreds of song lyrics that match this ship so if anyone wants to recommend TS songs that match, please reply or message me in the askbox! I'll analyze those and try to find lyrics that match