Pad Thai to Poltergeists

There are very few things I know about Thai food. All I know is that it involves a lot of noodles, spicy things, and that it is fucking DELICIOUS. To the best of my knowledge, Pad Thai is a delicious stir-fried Thai dish that has a lot of noodles in it. Noodles are also really popular in Japan. There's a Japanese movie I had to see this past year in my film class called Tampopo, which is about a cowboy (more like a Japanese man in a cowboy hat - he drives a delivery truck) who helps a widowed lady turn her noodle establishment into a paragon of the "art of noodle soup making" (you just can't make this stuff up...but apparently someone did). In Tampopo, there are lots of little subplot stories that pop up out of nowhere and disrupt the main narrative. All of them are disturbing in one way or another, and they all have something to do with noodles. One of them, for instance, involves a woman's etiquette class where the teacher is teaching a bunch of young ladies how to eat noodles silently, not like those damn foreigners who make slurpy noises when they eat. The scene lasts for almost two whole minutes of shots of these ladies giving up trying to be polite and slurping their noodles loudly. Another one of these little scenes involves a woman who gets up from her deathbed in order to cook her husband and two young kids their supper (Geez Ma, noodles again?!??). Then she just goes and dies in the noodle bowl. Lots of people think that when you die, you go to heaven or hell. Some people think that once you fall in the noodle bowl, that's about it. And then there are others who believe that you become a ghost. Some ghosts are friendly, like Casper, and others aren't, like Peeves. Peeves is a character from the Harry Potter books, and he's not just any old ghost. He's one of them that goes and moves shit around to freak normal, non-ghost people out. He, my friends, is a poltergeist. And the Harry Potter books are some of the best things that have ever happened to the world of fiction writing. Facts of life.

Leprechauns to Lord & Taylor.