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  1. Break.com’s Five Best Videos of the Week

    July 16, 2011 by admin

    5) 16 Year Old Bride’s First Interview
    Courtney Stodden made news when she married Doug Hutchison, which made the entire world cringe in unison. As gross as that was, it had nothing on the facial contortions Courtney pulls off at 3:18 into the video. Her brain is saying “Sexy,” and her face is saying “seizure.”

    16 Year Old Bride’s First Interview – Watch more Funny Videos

    (more…)

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  2. I’m Sorry I Resurrected The Term “Hipster”

    June 23, 2011 by admin

    I popularized the word hipster in 2000, and for that, I’m sorry. Since I dusted off the word and began applying it, it has taken off and been overused to the point that it seems that everyone is hipster and simultaneously everyone hates hipsters. Would that I could go back warn myself that I was unleashing a pestilence on the world, but I can’t. That’s the curse of being a tastemaker and a trend setter. Some trends you set for good and others, unfortunately, for ill.

    In 2000, I had two connotations for hipster. One was positive. It was from “Last of the Spiddyocks” by Digable Planets. There’s a line where Ish (Butterfly) raps “You down with Digable Planets you’s a hipster,” and it sounded so cool that I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want anything other than to be a hipster. The other contemporaneous usage was derogatory and came from Seinfeld. Jerry Seinfeld’s neighbor, Kramer, was often described as a doofus hipster. It is that usage of doofus that informed my own usage of the term. Kramer had a signature look: thrift store pants, bowling shirts, quirky hair. It was a look that was adopted by a lot of people my age. Even after the show ended, there were still people who maintained that look or at least an evolved version of that look. In particular, there were a bunch of guys who hung around outside the English Department at the University of Oklahoma in 2000 who maintained that aesthetic. My little brother called them “Weird Beards” because most of them had bears that were intricately trimmed and maintained like topiaries. They were generally smart guys, but they were the hardest core of the determined-to-be-different lot. I began referring to those guys as hipsters because they were to my mind latter-day Kramers. Well, needless to say soon others began using the appellation, and before too long it must have spread from Norman, Ok, to all points North, South, East and West.

    At first, I wanted to stop the spread and use of the term. I could see that the term was quickly being perverted to include people who would more accurately be described as scenesters. Maybe there were some things I could’ve done: aggressive pamphleteering, an edutainment series on public television, or unrestrained tsking whenever I heard the term being used. The spread of the word had just gone too far too fast, and I had to learn to let go. Otherwise, I would have spent years fretting my nights away. Now it appears hipster is here to stay. For that, I just want to apologize. I will try to be more responsible in popularizing words, music, tv shows, and anything else that I might regret later having made trendy. I also apologize for “Like A G6″ which I made popular with one tweet early in 2009.

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  3. Delicious Deserves To Die

    December 21, 2010 by Earnest Pettie

    I began using Del.icio.us back in 2005. Del.icio.us had been around two years and carried the promise of offering a better method of bookmarking websites than using the browser’s unwieldy dropdown and encouraging the discovery of new websites through link sharing. It made good on the first promise, but I don’t think it ever fully delivered on the second. According to Techcrunch, Delicious (as it was renamed after being purchased by Yahoo!) is due to be sunsetted in 2011.

    For me, the main strength of Delicious was that it liberated my bookmarks from the browser and allowed me to access them from any computer anytime. It also was one of the first websites I ever used that allowed me to “tag” anything. In addition to having my bookmarks searchable by name, I could categorize sites using whatever tags I found helpful. Your tags were also discoverable by other users of the service. Despite having millions of users, the social aspect of the site never really did anything for me. Largely, this was because almost no one I knew used the site. It was social before social was big.

    Ideally, one could use Delicious to discover new sites to peruse. You might search through tags, but because you didn’t know the people who’d bookmarked the sites, the tags were either untrustworthy or obvious. That is to say, you might search for comedy and come across either some lame collection of jokes or Comedycentral.com. I did eventually come across the blog We Make Money Not Art, which updated its Delicious bookmarks on a regular basis, constantly adding interesting new articles and photo galleries, but Delicious never really caught on for that kind of use.

    Meanwhile, “social” began its march toward being the buzzword we know and love today. Slashdot became a popular destination for discovering the latest tech news. It was replaced by Digg, which had a wider scope than tech news and became a destination for finding out news and content that was hot. Twitter and Facebook soon supplanted Digg as destinations for sharing cool links. As those link sharing sites proliferated, Delicious’s other strength, being a browser-free bookmarking service, was all that remained to set it apart. But soon, even that would disappear. First Opera, then Chrome, and finally Firefox all developed technologies that would allow you to access your bookmarks from whatever computer you were using, provided you were using their browsers.

    I still use Delicious. When I began working in internet video, I began accumulating hundreds of video sites I’d check for content. I had it all categorized on Delicious. In fact, I found that useful for sharing my links with my co-workers. I could simply send them URLs for my tagged bookmarks so that they would have access to my bookmarks. The problem for me is that that isn’t really reason enough to continue using Delicious. I can’t imagine why anyone would continue to use the service other than intertia.

    I will always have a fondness for Delicious. It is the same fondness that I have for Friendster and the old Northern Lights search engine. They were all innovative in their days, but we have little real use for them now. Instead of forcing it to amble on in its old age, Yahoo should put Delicious to sleep.

    Category Old Blog, Uncategorized | Tags: ,, | 1 Comment

  4. 5 Awesome Acapella Videos

    August 28, 2010 by Earnest Pettie

    acapellalogo

    Why do glee clubs and college acapella groups exist? Because there’s strength in numbers. You can diss one scrawny lover of vocal music, but the time and effort required to diss an entire group requires a bit more effort than the payoff is usually worth. I have always had a soft spot for these groups, but I’ve fallen hardcore for a certain substrain of these a capella groups. I love groups that cover current hip hop and pop songs, taking something that was already cool, making it geeky, but pushing the geekiness to an extreme that is wonderful. The most recent of these videos to become popular is this Columbia/Barnard cover of a Dr. Dre classic.

    This is a cover of Ben Fold’s cover, and what pushes this video into the realm of geeky cool is the costuming choices the girls have made. Tennis racquets? That’s the whole nine!

    Of course, I’ve amassed a number of other favorites over the years. Here a few I consider classic.

    The Final Countdown

    I borrowed a friend’s time machine and went back to 1996 just so that I could feel ok suggesting that this choreography is the bomb. After using that slang I returned to the present because in 1996, watching video on the internet meant using Quicktime and waiting half an hour to download ten seconds of postage stamp-sized video over Compuserve.

    Gangsta’s Paradise

    This is by one of my favorite acapella groups, UCLA’s Scattertones. Their b-girl stances and posturing are enough to make this video killer, but it’s the when you get to the bridge, where they kick the choreo into high gear with a step routine, that this video begins to soar. Even Coolio responded to this video on Youtube because it was so awesome. Coolio doesn’t just respond to anyone– unless you start by saying “I’m an agent, and I’m pretty sure I can sell your brand of feel-good party rap with gangsta feel to nostalgic  30-somethings in the Midwest.”

    Harder Better Faster Stronger

    This Daft Punk song was unavoidable on the Internet for a while. It’s popularity coincided with the birth of Youtube, and there were at least two other wildly popular viral videos based on the song. For me, this was more about the strength of the performance than the charisma of the performers or any other wow factor. I also like that the group is called the Carleton Knights because the group may not have been named for him, but who doesn’t think of Carlton from the Fresh Prince when thinking about glee clubs?

    Just Dance

    Normally, I disqualify songs that include musical accompaniment, but PS22 can not be bound by anything, least of all my arbitrary rules. These kids are amazing, and have several stellar covers under their belts, including Survivor’s Eye of the Tiger. My fear is that these kids will attempt to enroll at High School Musical’s East High in a few years, only to discover that it exists only in film, and then layers of their reality will fly away Inception-style. “People don’t like acapella?” “The people on Glee are autotuned?” “Our teacher isn’t cool outside of school?”

    I love Fox’s Glee. Glee has made this kind of music acceptable in the mainstream, but Glee actually does this kind of music a disservice. The vocals on the show are sometimes painfully post-produced, and only Lea Michele has a voice strong enough to make you forget about the instrumental accompaniment. That’s why I’m thankful for all the groups who have come up with their own quirky performances and uploaded them to the net over the years. Here is one bonus video for those of you who have made it this far.

    Videogame Medley:

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  5. What’s New With The Crew? 8/28

    August 28, 2010 by Earnest Pettie

    Take a quick trip around the bend with a few of my friends’ blogs, won’t you?

    Arnold Benedict had two problems: A bum for a roommate, and, after evicting said roommate, an empty room full of potential. Instead of exploiting said room for profit, he built a camera obscura!

    …if you’re like me, you have a lot of time on your hands, and not a whole lot of money [re: broke as shit from three paragraphs above], and no immediate desire to move someone into that empty space. So I did some research and decided to look into building a camera obscura [after getting denied access previously on account of I'm 'not an old person' (statement made by a security guard at the senior recreation center in Santa Monica in response to 'can we go in there?')].

    -Read more at Down in the Well

    Over at Notzombies.com, between recaps of True Blood and Bachelor Pad (yes, Bachelor Pad), NotZombies discusses the day, this week, when his lunch hour went action movie.

    At that exact moment, less than a block away, an armed officer of the Beverly Hills Police Department was screaming into his shoulder mic for reinforcements. “I NEED BACK UP! GOD DAMN IT, I AM IN THE SHIT HERE! CALL SWAT! FUCK, CALL THE GOD DAMN ARMY! JUST GET ME SOME FIREPOWER AND GET IT HERE 10 MINUTES AGO!”

    -Read More at NotZombies

    Inkoo at Thinkovision recaps Mad Men

    The Don v. Ted feud had a brilliant dénouement, but the upstart rival storyline was a fly I kept swatting away.  We didn’t know enough about the Pete-ish Ted to gauge whether he posed a real challenge to Don, making the feud hard to care about — though to get the attention of the New York Times, Ted must be a pretty gifted self-promoter, if not a great ad man.

    -Read More at Thinkovision

    Amy weighs in on Piranha 3D with her review for Boxoffice.com

    Are you a breast man? An ass man? Or a fish man? Either way, there’s plenty of all three in this bloody spree by French director Alexandre Aja. The script is ridiculous, the bodies are great and the film skates so long on the line between knowingly bad and bad that by the time the body count hits 100 and the booby count hits 1000, we’ve lost track of the difference.

    -Read more at Amyweekly

    And Ross Lincoln has been up to… update your blog, Ross! 

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  6. Creepy Chrysler Town and Country Ad

    August 14, 2010 by Earnest Pettie

    townandcountry

    I have a superpower. When a commercial break interrupts a television program I’m watching, I can disappear completely into my head for the duration of the commercial break. I don’t need the commercial skip on my Tivo because I’ve trained myself to skip them. That’s one of the reasons I was surprised when my wife pointed out to me something very interesting about an ad for the Chrysler Town and Country minivan that I’m sure must’ve passed before my eyes hundreds of times without any notice. The ad depicts a young boy being challenged to a race home from school by some of his classmates. Once he makes it to his mom’s minivan, he taunts his friends as his mom pulls away. Check it out.

    All fun and games, right?

    Well, if you watch the ad without audio, it become another ad, entirely. It then becomes an ad about a poor kid being picked on by bullies at school. They wait for him after school’s out and chase him all the way to his house, where the mama’s boy leaps into the safety of his mom’s minivan and rolls away, taunting his tormentors. I’ve added a little different music to the commercial to better underscore the point.

    Poor kid!

    The best part is once you’ve had the benefit of watching it this way, it becomes obvious how tacked on the kid’s voice-over is in the official commercial. That leads me to wonder what the commercial was originally like. I imagine the tagline was “Chrysler Town and Country. The next best thing to returning to the womb.”

    Category Old Blog, Uncategorized | Tags: ,,, | 26 Comments

  7. Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World

    August 14, 2010 by Earnest Pettie

    scott-pilgrim-vs-world-review-meta

    I haven’t yet seen Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, so I don’t have any thoughts of my own to share about the movie yet. I’ve noticed, however, that many of my friends have published their thoughts on the movie, so I thought I’d do a little metareview of the movie.

    Amy Nicholson for IE Weekly says:

    Edgar Wright has made a 112-minute entertainment contraption, celluloid that shapeshifts its frames into video games, comic books and sitcoms…. It could give a seizure to anyone in the Twitterverse unused to dividing their brain among twelve browser windows. But for the already addled—myself, millions more and metastasizing—it’s a blast: fun, fresh and unbounded with an ensemble that delivers every joke and elbow jab.  Read the rest here.

    Inkoo Kang at Thinkovision offers:

    Scott Pilgrim is an adorable indie action-romance told in video game language that is far better than the sum of its genre parts…. if the plot isn’t super-original, the winsomely nerdy way it’s told more than makes up for the narrative’s by-the-bookiness.  Read the rest here.

    Benji Briggs for Screenjunkies writes:

    Wright, like a painter with vintage nintendo system, builds the 8-bit video game action of Scott Pilgrim to come at us with such freshness and detail that you’ll keep asking for more, more, more.  Read the rest here.

    Tasha Carter gushes:

    Dude-man-girlfriend you will NOT be disappointed! It’s tons of fun! The only thing that bummed me out was the thought of eventually not being able to see it on the big screen anymore with a kickass sound system. It just won’t be the same on dvd. :-( (Yes I realize that I am thinking very far ahead)   Via Facebook.

    Brian Huntington for Not Zombies dissents:

    Scott Pilgrim- really disappointing. Great visuals. Even better sound. Couldn’t care less about the characters. Via Twitter

    That’s once around the horn with people I know and trust, and the bulk of the sentiment seems to land solidly in the movie’s camp. I look forward to the movie, and maybe I’ll relate my own thoughts after watching Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Just after I finish my rebuttal to Roger Ebert’s review of Kick-Ass… so sometime in 2012, just before the world ends. Allegedly.

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  8. 6 Unsung Heroes Of Videogaming

    July 18, 2010 by Earnest Pettie

    Some of the most popular trends in contemporary gaming can have their roots traced back to earlier games that were definitely popular but whose impact on gaming rarely get the recognition they deserve. Here are just five games I think deserve more recognition for their impact on gaming.

    Snake

    The first time I played this game, it wasn’t yet Morning in America and the cast of Diff’rent Strokes all had bright futures ahead of them. It came on a cassette tape for the tape drive on my Commodore Vic-20 computer. Some of you may be thinking “tape drive?” Others of you may be thinking “cassette tape?” Yes, in the early days of personal computing, you were as likely to find games on cassette tapes and cartridges as you were to find them on floppy disks. (I’m pretty sure someone just said “floppy disk?”)

    This game is probably the simplest computer game employing graphics you’ve ever come across. You are in control of a line that gets longer and longer as you play. You are competing against another ever-lengthening line, and if you touch yourself or the other line, you die. If this game had died out with the first generation of home computers, it wouldn’t be on this list. The game, however, got another lease on life as cell phones became advanced enough to show simple graphics.

    There was a time—roughly 2000-2001–when it seemed like every cell phone had this game packed into it. The inclusion of that game primed us for the inevitability of mobile gaming on cell phones. Before long, snake would be replaced with solitaire, bowling, java games, and eventually downloadable apps, but there was a brief moment when Snake defined cell phone gaming and heralded the arrival of the cell phone as a mobile gaming device.

    Excitebike

    For people who grew up with the NES, this game likely brings back fond memories. Excitebike was a simple motocross racing game that was recently revived for the Wii. The games simple mechanics made it easy to play but difficult to master. If it were just gameplay we were talking about, there’d be little to set Excitebike apart from its contemporaries.

    Excitebike included something, though, that allowed it to stand out from other games of its era. It included a track editor. You could create your own tracks and race on them. Unfortunately, only Japanese gamers could save their tracks to disc to share with their friends; the rest of us created tracks, raced them, then created more. I reached a point where I was spending as much time creating tracks as racing on them. It wasn’t the first game to feature a level editor, but it was the first popular, mainstream game that I can recall featuring one. 

    This wasn’t a feature that other games rushed to copy. I think, though, that we have finally reached a point with the release of Modnation Racers and Little Big Planet where level creation has come into its own and made the leap from the DIY modding community into the mainstream. It’s taken 25 years, but this concept has finally reached fruition.

    GAUNTLET

    Gauntlet was a dungeon crawler that holds the distinction of holding a number of firsts. It was the first arcade game that allowed for different classes of characters. It was also the first four-player co-op arcade game. Level after level, you and three teammates rushed to kill hordes of enemies in order to make it to the level’s exit.

    Gauntlet is an old arcade classic whose brilliance was never really realized on home consoles. Part of the reason for that is that the game was designed for an arcade experience. Specifically, the game was designed to eat quarters which created a sense of urgency in gamers that the home experience just could not duplicate.

    Anyone who was around during the original arcade game’s heyday will probably have fond memories of this game, but the game’s luster has been dusted over as time has gone by. What this game did though can not be dismissed. This game was the first four-player co-op game, so every time you fire up a co-op game over Xbox Live or PSN, you are playing on the legacy of Gauntlet, which first taught gamers to look out for their teammates, communicate, and plan ahead as a group.

    Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!

    The easiest thing you can do to create a high profile for a video game is attach a popular brand name to it. Sometimes, this works, and sometimes it doesn’t. A variation on that theme is the celebrity endorsement. By 1987, celebrities came no larger than the former unified champion of the world, Mike Tyson. Nintendo attached Mike Tyson to the NES port of its arcade series Punch-Out! and a star was born (not Mike Tyson, but contender Little Mac).

    What makes this game unique among games with celebrity licenses is that game systems finally had reached a point of ubiquity that a meaningful celebrity endorsement could help create a blockbuster. No matter how popular Larry Bird and Dr. J were, their game was never going to have the same kind of recognition as Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!

    Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out! is by no means an obscure game, but I think that its legacy is that it was the first game to demonstrate the strength of the celebrity endorsement. There were other boxing games that provided a more satisfying boxing experience, but, like Mike Tyson’s prodigious punches, his name on the game was something that could not be countered. It would be a full decade before another celebrity endorsement would prove as formidable. Tony Hawk took what Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out! promised and delivered millions of sale over tons of sequels.

    PaRappa The Rapper

    As much as I loved the idea of Parappa The Rapper, the game infuriated me. PaRappa the Rapper was arguably the first rhythm game to be developed for home video gaming. The gameplay was simple, you simply tapped your keys in sync with an on-screen display, as the characters rapped on-screen. What was infuriating about this game, for me, was that I felt like the rhythm aspect was unforgiving. Despite that, I still loved the game for having rapping characters and innovative gameplay.

    Other rhythm games soon followed, most famously Dance Dance Revolution. From Dance Dance Revolution, it’s just a hop, skip, and jump to Guitar Hero and Rock Band, all of which utilize essentially the same gameplay.

    You might suggest that the timing element introduced by PaRappa The Rapper had existed before. For instance, in many basketball games, your free throw accuracy was determined by timing your shot so that you pressed the button when an on-screen indicator was in a sweet spot. It was PaRappa The Rapper, however, that made that rhythm element the central focus of the game and added the music element. Without that I might never have spent hours trying to pass “Institutionalized” by Suicidal Tendencies in Guitar Hero 2. The irony is that there hasn’t yet been a great rap game to emerge from the rhythm game genre (in which I include karaoke games).

    The Sierra Network

    If you played computer games in the late eighties/early nineties, the name Sierra On-Line is probably very meaningful to you. Sierra On-Line created some of that era’s most popular computer games, including Leisure Suit Larry, Space Quest, and King’s Quest. The irony is that the company was never actually “online,” in the modern sense of the word, until it created The Sierra Network, released in 1991. The Sierra Network was an online community that allowed its users to create their own avatars and play a number of games, from casual games to arcade flight sims and RPGs together.

    1991, wow. That was a time before the World Wide Web and Mosaic browser. To connect to The Sierra Network, you used a 2400 baud modem. That’s like a fifth the speed of current dial-up modems, and it was a time before unlimited access to the internet. That’s right, you paid by the hour to connect to The Sierra Network.

    It was essentially a two-dimensional version of the same kind of online community for gamers provided by Second Life or Playstation @Home. It was just so ahead of its time with so few people who could actually use it that there was no way for Sierra On-Line to operate the service and keep it profitable.  The idea behind The Sierra Network was sound, and people never gave up on the idea of creating online communities for people to gather and play games. Probably the most important lesson to come out of this was that there would be an audience for the online gaming communities the Internet made possible and that the key would be learning how to properly monetize them.

     

    So there you have it: Six video games whose effect on modern gaming are indisputable and yet rarely get the recognition they deserve.

    Category Old Blog, Uncategorized | Tags: ,, | 3 Comments

  9. Warren G and Nate Dogg’s "Regulate" Synopsis

    July 11, 2010 by Earnest Pettie

    On one of those cool, clear nights typical in Southern California, Warren G is driving around, looking around for women to have sex with. He’s chosen to engage in this pursuit all alone.

    Nate Dogg, however, has just arrived in Long Beach, seeking Warren G. Ironically, Nate Dogg passes a car full of women who are excited to see him. He insists to the women that there’s no cause for the excitement.

    Warren G makes a left at 21st and Lewis, where he sees a group of young men playing dice. He hops out, excited to find people to play with but discovers that they don’t want to play dice. Instead, they would rather steal his goods. Once they pull out their pistols, Warren G realizes he’s stuck.

    Nate Dogg, meanwhile, is trying to avoid the women who saw him earlier. Some of them might be prostitutes, and he isn’t interested in prostitutes right now. As he evades the potential hookers, he sees Warren G being held up by some young toughs.

    Warren G, unaware that Nate Dogg is nearby, can not believe he’s being robbed. In fact, he is so incredulous that he asks what else the robbers would like to steal. This is most likely a rhetorical question.

    Nate Dogg sees these unfortunate proceedings and realizes that he may have to shoot people with his gun.

    Despite Long Beach’s reputation for crime, Warren G can’t believe that a hold up would happen there, especially to him. As he imagines himself escaping through supernatural means, he notices that Nate Dogg is there.

    Nate Dogg has seventeen bullets to expend on this group of thieves and he uses many of them. Afterward, he generously shares with Warren G the credit for neutralizing the situation, though clearly Nate Dogg did all of the hard work. In fact, Nate Dogg quickly reminds himself that he has committed multiple homicides to save Warren G before letting Warren know that there are females nearby if he’d like to have sex with any of them.

    Warren recalls that it was, in fact, sex with women for which he’d ventured out into the night and is thankful that Nate knows where there are women, who may or may not be prostitutes.

    Nate soon finds the women he’d left before, one of whom likes chubby men. She comes up with a flimsy excuse about her car having broken down in order to persuade Nate Dogg and Warren G to allow her to come with them. Soon, Warren G and Nate Dogg are driving with a car full of women to the Eastside Hotel for an orgy, which reinforces Nate’s earlier suspicion that the women were prostitutes.

    Warren G and Nate Dogg explain their G Funk musical style before Nate Dogg issues a vague threat to “busters,” suggesting that he and Warren G will regulate the situation. This could be taken to mean that Nate Dogg will murder them while Warren G stands nearby and shares credit afterward.

    Category Old Blog, Uncategorized | Tags: | 1 Comment

  10. Parents Just Don’t Understand: Synopsis

    July 9, 2010 by Earnest Pettie

    The Fresh Prince begins by expounding on the universal inability of parents to understand their children, suggesting that neither time nor location would make a difference in parents recognizing their kids’ potential to err. He suggests, however, that it is incumbent on children to recognize the dimwittedness of adults and just accept it as a given.

    To illustrate, Fresh Prince launches into the first of two vignettes, recollections from his own youth. In this first flashback, Fresh Prince’s mother takes him and the rest of the family shopping for school clothes at the Gallery Mall. At first, Fresh Prince doesn’t mind his mother’s efforts. Soon, however, she begins bugging. She begins selecting clothes for Fresh Prince that are horribly outdated, and he rebels, insisting that he does not want to look like a member of the rock band Sha Na Na. Unfortunately, she prevails, and, inevitably, the first day of school arrives. He goes to school where he is ridiculed, presumably because of his clothing. When he informs his mom, she retorts with the platitude that “if they were laughing you don’t need them ’cause they’re not good friends,” which, technically, is sound advice. Fresh Prince, understands, though, that the torment will not be a one-time occasion and attempts to convince his mother that mitigating the ridicule by purchasing more current clothing might be worth the effort. Unfortunately, she remains unconvinced. It is through illustrating his unsuccessful efforts at swaying his parent that Fresh Prince hopes he can convince other youths that the argument is not worth the effort.

    Next Fresh Prince presents another scenario: In this situation, his parents have left town for a week, leaving behind their brand new Porsche (while his parents do not remain abreast of current trends in fashion, they are up-to-date on automotive trends). He experiences a moral dilemma over whether or not he should borrow the car but soon rationalizes that it would be ok if he were to take for just a little spin. While driving, he passes an attractive woman walking down the street. After getting her attention, he invites her to take a ride in the car. Understandably, she is wary of getting in a car with a stranger, but Fresh Prince soon convinces her that ownership of an expensive car should assuage any fears she’d have about his character. Convinced, she hops into the car and soon the couple find themselves at McDonald’s, which would seem to undercut the facade presented by the Porsche, but the woman is too interested in caressing Fresh Prince’s thigh to notice.

    Fresh Prince is excited by having the girl’s hand on his thigh and begins speeding. Soon, they are pulled over by the police, who detain Fresh Prince but send the girl back home. It turns out she is a twelve-year-old runaway. The police inform Fresh Prince’s parents of the situation, and they return from their trip to take Fresh Prince home from the police precinct. Both parents, visibly upset, express their frustration through physical abuse. It is difficult for them to understand how easily a situation might arise in which a child would steal a car, pick up a prepubescent runaway with romantic intentions, and speed through a neighborhood. It is even more difficult for Fresh Prince to understand why they can’t understand how that might occur. So, one last time, he urges the youth of America to accept their parents’ lack of judgement.

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