Riddle me this, Batman…

When I go to the movies I always hope for the isle seat. I bet you can guess why.

Went to the movies the other day to see the Batman spectacular. For some reason there is no law against the food that makes the noise! Crinkle crinkle goes the wrapping paper. Crunch crunch goes the popcorn. I can live with that most of the time – unless the patron next to me insists on making that horrible noise while the hero is leaning in over his lady-love pouring his heart out while the music whispers softly in the background like the susurrus of a breaking heart.

I get a bad feeling when the seat next to me get taken by a young lady not very well endowed in the height department, for which she had been amply compensated in girth. She narrowly avoids breaking my nose with her elbow as she struggles out of her jacket and then settles down, beginning a whispered conversation with her boyfriend – and it seems to be about who is supposed to hold on to the large bag of … deep fried pork rinds?

I don’t honestly know what I find more disturbing here – that Mr and Mrs Fatty McArse thought it was a good idea to spend two hours munching away at the movies, or that they thought pork rinds was the way to go, or that they brought them from home…

I’m not a big fan of the idea of eating at the movies. I think we should be able to go 1 hour and 31 minutes without grazing, but I have been informed that popcorn and movies go together like… well, popcorn and movies. I think it should be the responsibility of theatres to provide silent candy only. And there should certainly be no slurping! None what so ever. That noise goes straight to my tiger glands and makes me want to rip someone’s throat out.

Anyway – they settle the bag between them and start chewing, crunching and crinkling. I draw a breath. I am about to explain in my kindest, gentlest voice that they should please please please stop making that noise when the movie starts and a big grin spreads on my face. Picture a contented smiling Buddha, enlightened and at one with all the mellow parts of the universe. Dark Knight is … loud. In a good way. They start blowing shit up almost immediately. I can’t hear my munching neighbours. I can’t hear a damned thing except the movie. Surround sound THX explosions. Ah. Bliss.

I liked the movie for other reasons too – psychopath anarchist nihilistic bad guys are always a treat. Heath Ledger gives a great last performance as the Joker. He played the Joker like a chaos demon. The last two Batman movies have redeemed the genre somewhat from the camp performances that have gone before. And they raise some interesting questions about morality if you’re in to that kind of thing. They also blow up a lot of stuff – and that’s what you want. Good value for money.

Best of all – I didn’t have to beat anyone up with their own bag of candy.

ROL

What do these people eat?

For me there’s a kind of hierarchy to food. At the very top you’ll find fresh fruit and veg and then you slowly trickle down the list until you wind up with canned goods like those odd whole cobs of corn in a tin – I never did understand the point in them. They taste like … well, they don’t really taste of anything. And the texture is almost, but not completely, unlike corn. It’s backwoods survivalist food. The kind of stuff you buy and stick in your bomb shelter in case you have to duck and cover. Not that that’s going to work, but you get the idea. It’s not really for eating, it’s there simply to give you a last resort in case you really have nothing else.

Taking care of someone else’s pets, staying at their house, you get a more in-depth sense of how people live. Show me your fridge and I’ll tell you who you are… That kind of thing.

So there I am, looking for something to eat. These people are mostly vegetarians, that ought to be some kind of guarantee for there being fresh fruit and vegetables in there somewhere. You’d think so wouldn’t you? Nope. Five thousand little jars and cans and Tupperware containers full of assorted condiments. Every kind of salad dressing and hamburger sauce you could possibly imagine. But no actual food. The only fresh vegetable I could find was potatoes, and those were looking a little sad, frankly. Not sprouting yet, but clearly working their way there.

Abandoning the cold storage I move to the cabinets thinking there should be some pasta or something. And there they are. Rows upon rows of tinned goods. Everything from olives (mmm olives…) to the dreaded tinned corncobs (the hell?). And enough Ramen to keep a small Asian army going for at least a month. Ok, so there are the basics to make some kind of food, but there’s really nothing I want to eat. I actually like noodles, but noodles with noodle-topping covered in hamburger sauce just doesn’t do it for me. Moving along I find another cabinet filled to gills with cookies, cheese puffs, potatoes chips, crackers and every other kind of cheap unhealthy snack you can possibly imagine. All of them non-brand names.

The thing that really sunk the boat for me, though, was the ice cream. When my brother asked if there was anything special they should buy for me my answer was, as it invariably is in these circumstance, ice cream. Love ice cream. Don’t have an icebox. You’d think there is hardly any way you can go wrong with ice cream, right? Delving into frozen depths where sad prefabricated pirogues have gone to colonize the frozen tundra I find the ice cream. And then realisation hits – it is violet flavoured. Now, I have never met an ice cream I didn’t like, but violets? Really? I put the ice cream back. It might be good. It might not. I’m not in the mood to try something an unhealthy hue of purple reminiscent of a fading bruise.

So the question on my mind as I nibble a biscuit is “what do these people eat?” Inquiring minds want to know.

ROL