Sometimes I wonder what happened to ushers at movie theaters. Those were the people who wore the little bell hop uniform and had a great big flashlight. If anyone was being noisy or disruptive
they would come over and shine that light on you like the wrath of god
or would evict you if they felt like it. These days if someone is being rude you have to sit there and suffer for it
or at the most extreme go and complain to the manager. (Well
of course you could yell at them
throw popcorn or rotten tomatoes
or roll up your sleeves and flex your biceps in a menacing way. However
I am trying to keep it civilized here)
I remember those ushers at a little movie theater I used to go to when I was a kid. My friend and I would walk to it. The theater was a little dumpy place with two screens in it at the most. Some hoodlums had once rearranged the letters on the movie sign so that they read 'THE PUSSY VIPER". I did not get it at the time
but I snicker about it now.
Anyways
that's my Grampa 'in my days!' speech for the day.
My dinner came out crappy last night. I was making a stromboli using a can of Pillsbury triple bleached goo. However I had picked up the French bread goo instead of the pizza dough goo. As a result the stomboli puffed out alarmingly
and thought the outside cooked to a deep brown crips
the inside remained soft and doughy. The uncooked dough merged with the melted cheese and created this gelatinous mass that I probably should not have eaten but I took a few bites out of it anyways.
Some day when aliens take over the earth and use humans for cattle
and humans spend their entire lives in a little cage with a feeding tube strapped to their mouth
that dough-cheese-goo is what they are going to be pumping in through the tube. All day.
Had a bad-cat experience last knight. I figured out there the black fur in my house is coming from. Last night some little stray cat skittered into my house. He is no more than out of kitten hood
and his hair sticks out all over him in an alarmingly. He saw me
ran right into the wall
ran in three circles
and then shot out the door. I don't know if he will be back. I really don't want to know why his hair is falling out in tufts.
I have family dropping by tonight. I was supposed to clean
but instead loafed in front of back-to-back episodes of 'stargate'. My house is not real dirty. And it's not like the pope is coming over. They can deal with it.
Time machine to a 2006 universe where Ed eats undercooked stromboli goo, mourns ushers, and meets a tuft-shedding stray cat.
Ah, 2006—when a movie theater was still a communal gamble and a tube of Pillsbury's triple bleached goo was considered dinner. I miss the flashlight-wielding usher as much as Ed does, honestly. Now we pay a small fortune for a recliner, order snacks from an app, and still text through the whole film; there is no wrath-of-god beam, just the glow of someone's phone in your peripheral vision. And if you stay home, the streaming algorithm decides your whole evening, no bellhop required. The grocery store now delivers the same bleached goo to your door, but the instructions argue with you about oven temperature. And that stray cat with tufts falling out? In 2026 he'd be on every neighborhood app within the hour, with forty diagnoses and a live cam for the fur-loss saga. Instead, Ed just let him skitter off into the night. Honestly, the real alien invasion was the dough-cheese gelatinous mass, and Ed took a few bites anyway. Some things don't improve with time.
“2006 Ed, after watching that stromboli puff up alarmingly and biting into a gelatinous dough-cheese mass, what exactly told you a few more bites was the right call—curiosity, hunger, or the Stargate marathon rewiring your judgment?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: So, Beelzebubba, you want to know what told me a few more bites was the right call? Honestly, it was a little bit of all three, plus the Stargate marathon making me feel like I was on a mission to boldly eat whatever sludge came through the wormhole. Curiosity got me to the first bite, because I had to see if the outside crunch was hiding something magical or something tragic. Then hunger took over, because I’d already put in the effort and damn if I was going to let the oven win. And sure, the TV probably rewired my judgment a little, Jack O’Neill would’ve eaten it just to prove he could. So I sat there chewing this weird dough-cheese-glue, telling myself it was basically a calzone from a parallel dimension. It wasn’t. But I regret nothing except maybe not having a beer handy. Take that, foul stromboli.
