I'm constantly frustrated by movie popcorn. It's bad enough that it's ridiculously over priced and doesn't taste that good. Never mind that it's worse for you than a vat of bacon grease. What makes me angry is that every time I get the popcorn from the bottom of the popcorn-making machine. The tiny, pea-sized bits of popcorn that don't taste like popcorn. They're disgusting as they are annoying.

I dismissed the first few times that my popcorn bucket consisted almost entirely of little popcorn flakes. "Some 16-year-old kid just wasn't careful when he was shoveling the popcorn, next time my popcorn will come in whole pieces," I said naively to myself. But after consistently, repeatedly receiving tasteless shards instead of popcorn, this optimism has been shattered. That's when it struck me--maybe I'm not the only one. Maybe they serve this nasty popcorn to everyone, everywhere all the time. Maybe there's not just a little rain cloud following me around, but it's actually just constantly raining everywhere on the entire planet. A whole new level of pessimism dawned upon my soul.

On an unrelated note, I've decided that Thursday's are my favorite day of the week.

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Last night, my dad and I were between my car and my house when we heard yelling at the Chinese food store across the street from my house. There was crowd of five or six kids in their early teens that were causing trouble. A petite, solemn Chinese woman stood her ground in the doorway so they couldn't get back in the store. Inexplicably, the two Asian men from the store stood behind her. Two kids especially were the agitators. We watched from the other side of the street as the kids spat in the face of one them and then threw a glass bottle at their heads. While the kids screamed and cursed, the storeowners just stood stoically in the entrance of their store. There was nothing else to do. The massive cultural-language barrier between the middle-aged Asian immigrants and African-American teenagers was obvious. But there was no barrier between the store owners and the punks.

At one point, it seemed like the kids had left for good, so the Asian woman stepped outside onto the sidewalk, but the two men stayed inside. Then suddenly the kids came running back. The woman was alone outside the store and the kids quickly surrounded her, so Dad and I decided we had to do something. I took my professionally trained expertise with the bow staff and my Dad took his years of experience in cage-fighting across the street to handle this problem. We yelled at the kids to leave and told them that we were calling 911. (We didn't want to hurt the poor kids, besides, I didn't have my bow staff with me anyway.) As I dialed 911, our presence wasn't enough to scare the two kids causing the trouble, but it was enough to scare their friends. The friends grabbed the two kids and literally dragged them away.

We stayed to ask the people what happened, but none of them spoke English well enough to tell us. The woman's hand was bleeding pretty bad from the shattered bottle. A teenage girl came from behind the register who could speak English fairly well. Shaking from fear, she cried, "This happens every night."
"Why didn't you call 911?" we asked.
"We did--twice." My call to 911 made three, but it wasn't enough to get the police there in time.

About an hour and half later, we looked outside and saw a police officer talking to the store owners. We went over to see if we could help, since we saw what happened. We told the officer what we saw. Then I started respectfully complaining to the police officer, "How can these people protect themselves? What can they do? We called 911 three times and nobody came." I was frustrated and almost angry. Somebody had to stick up for these poor people. The officer listened patiently, and then motioned us over to where his patrol car was parked. He shined his flashlight in the backseat, "Is that the kid?" "Yep, that's him," we said. The officer won that argument and my respect. Kudos to the Philly police.

The officer said that we could go down to the precinct and make a statement to the detectives. We were glad to help. The officer told us to wait about a half hour because the kid had to be booked before the detective could take the statement. It was about 10:00pm, we ate cheesecake at my house and went over to the 24th District a little after 10:30pm. At 12:30am the detective was finally ready to take the statements, but he didn't need ours, just the two store owner's. "Thanks, for coming down, though." I got in bed a little before 1:00am. Real Samaritans are more tired than they are good.

A few days later, lunch and curiosity brought me back over to the store to find out what happened. The kid hade made bail on Tuesday, the same night. On Wednesday, the same kids were back terrorizing the store again. But on Thursday the store invested in several security cameras. The kids came back, saw the cameras, and haven't been back since. So it wasn't good Samaritans, beefy police officers or the threat of legal action that stopped the punks--it was simple accountability.

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