The Most Useful Website Ever

How many times has this happened to you? You're sitting in a darkened theater, in the middle of the aisle, having washed down your $12.00 tub of popcorn with your $8.50 bucket of orange soda, thrilling to the onscreen action, when you feel that first ominous tingle in your nether regions. Uh oh. You need to go to the bathroom! Can you hold it? You flip open your cellphone: Hmm. . . Movie's only been on for an hour. AND IT'S A HARRY POTTER MOVIE!!! OK, that settles it: You can't wait. But when should you go? Things are pretty quiet right now, but who knows when that nasty Voldemort is going to rear his ugly head? Plus, Harry and Ginny are having a quiet moment: Maybe this is where they finally confess their feelings for each other! And we'd hate to miss a Snape scene. Well, Cousin of Solipsist (COS, not to be confused with Cats of Solipsist--also COS) today drew our attention to what may be the most important website ever: RunPee.com.

Describing its mission as "helping your bladder enjoy going to the movies as much as you do," RunPee.com compiles information on movies to let you know the best times to, well, run and pee. Although focusing for obvious reasons on movies currently in theaters (after all, once a film makes it to DVD, the "Pause" button pretty much eliminates the need for its services), Runpee.com also provides guidance for some classic films. To give you an idea of how the site works, here is their entry for "Raiders of the Lost Ark":

First, you are provided with the running time of the film, in this case 1 hour and 55 minutes. A "thermometer"-type gauge then shows you visually where the "pee times" occur. In "Raiders" these occur near the 45- and 75-minute marks.

(Digression: One quibble about the site: Aside from the black text, the only color is an extremely suggestive yellow, constantly glancing at which suggests the need for another website, "Runpuke.com." EOD)

Below the thermometer is a text box:

"RunPee approximately 42 minutes into the movie when. . . Indy shoots the driver of a big army transport truck. It rolls over and explodes."

You are then told approximately how long you will have to RunPee (3 minutes) and given a summary of what you will miss. Cleverly, this summary is initially presented in scrambled form, in case you don't want to see a "spoiler." Unscrambling the summary, we see

"Indy is drinking whiskey. Over a minute goes by without any dialog at all. Indy sits down with Belloq. Belloq tells Indy that they are not so different. Indy says, "Now you're getting nasty." The only important think Belloq says is that the Ark is like a radio for speaking to God and that he plans on using it before handing it over to his boss--Hitler."

Now this is a helpful website--just what the internet was made for. We could have used it back when we saw "JFK": We squirmed in our seats throughout Kevin Costner's endless speech. To this day, if anyone says, "Back and to the left," we find ourselves needing to. . . to. . . . Excuse us!

Ah, that's better.

We think, however, that this premise has not been tapped to anything like its fullest potential. In addition to the aforementioned "RunPuke.com," how about a website for smokers? A true nicotine addict has tremendous difficulty sitting through a long movie. Since smoking takes longer than peeing, "RunSmoke.com" would have to provide longer stretches of cinematic tedium for its clients. And, y'know, sometimes you have to do more than pee; "RunPoop.com," anyone? Of course, THAT one would need to provide a lot more information, as the time one needs for a number two is generally more variable than that associated with a number one.

Or what if you're watching something like "9 1/2 Weeks." Or, y'know, something ostensibly less, um, provocative--"Harry Potter," say--y'know, when the light just hits Maggie Smith in that certain way. . . . You know what we're talking about. Anyway, we need a website that would give people good times to deal with their. . . overstimulation. Nomenclature is admittedly a problem here, so we'll turn to the Brits: "RunShag.com." As with "RunPoop," the site would have to provide people with various windows of time in which to take care of their business: Certainly, most people can take care of this "issue" in about a minute or two, but (not to brag or anything) the Solipsist would need at least three minutes! It's true!

By the way, RunPuke.com, RunSmoke.com, RunPoop.com, and RunShag.com are all unregistered trademarks of Solipsistic Musings, Inc.

And we profoundly apologize for this entry.