Unrealistic Life Ambitions #1: Truth In Cinema

Looking at this blog's traffic stats, it would appear that quite a few of my visitors are getting here by searching for the phrase "unrealistic ambitions", or something similar. This gets them to this post from a few months back, which actually has absolutely nothing to do with ambitions, unrealistic or otherwise. Worse, the post title shows up on Google, suggesting that I actually did come up with 153 unrealistic ambitions. This, I imagine, would lead to some disappointment on the part of visitors who really wanted to know about my thwarted intentions for my life.

Well. This is one problem that I will be able to resolve right now, as I introduce Unrealistic Life Ambitions, my new occasional series. (When I say "occasional", I'm not kidding - don't expect these to turn up with any more regularity than Uncle Phil Making Arithmetic Fun.) There are many things that I'd like to do at some point in my life. Some of these are reasonably achievable (getting a job, eternal happiness, and so on), whereas others are verging on the impossible. It's that "verging" that is just keeping them from the realm of "castles in the air".

The first Ambition is one that I've had ever since I first bought a "Medium" size tub of popcorn at the cinema. "Medium", for those who don't know, is the only accurate sizing term that cinema popcorn salesmen use, and that's only because it's a completely relative term. Their "small" tubs are large enough for most of your lower arm, and the "large" ones...well, I suspect that they had a grain bushel somewhere in their ancestry. They really do contain more popcorn than anyone could reasonably be expected to eat - I'm confidently expecting the first "I got fat because the salesman offered to super size me" lawsuit to hit Odeon any day now.

And yet, these sizes are a little disappointing. The whole point of going to the cinema is to escape your actual life and swap it for that of the actors on the screen. Or for that of the enormous killer robots blowing things up. Either's good. And in that case, you don't want any part of the experience to be remotely normal. You want the most surreal experience that you can get, so that you're as disconnected from your real life as possible. How is it going to be satisfying for customers to enter these cavernous, loud, dark rooms, to see entirely unbelievable things happen on the giant screen in front of them, and then to be brought back to earth with the realisation that the tub of corn-derived polystyrene in front of them is of a size that, with a little effort, they could have put together at home?

Well, no more. My unrealistic life ambition to solve this problem is simple: acquire a cinema chain for the sole purpose of serving the "large" size of popcorn in oil drums. When the customers can take up temporary residence inside their snack servings, we will know that we have finally restored the requisite level of surreality to the movie-going experience.