Please, Connie, Make It Stop

I have to say, I’d much rather Jeff Vandam crib from the Villager than write features about the stupid shit people put on YouTube:

On Saturday, Dec. 16, three actresses in their 20s ventured out to Herald Square with a video camera and a surreptitious mission: to approach unsuspecting pedestrians from behind and gently stroke their hair without their knowledge. They filmed one another’s efforts, which for the most part succeeded in failing to attract notice from various hair pettees, bar a few suspicious looks.

A few weeks later, having edited the video and set it to a kind of funky elevator music, the women posted it on YouTube, the Internet video site. Since then, the Hair Petting Game, as it is called, has been viewed nearly 25,000 times on YouTube, and thousands more times through links. The reaction has not been mild.

“Worst video ever,” someone called TheRealWilliamBailey wrote on YouTube, an opinion repeated in various forms by many others. “You should play in traffic.”

Some watched the video and called it harmless, even joyful, though such comments were in a distinct minority. “I want to be indignant about how awful this is, too. I really do,” wrote Caroline, a user on Gothamist.com, one of the first sites to link to the Hair Petting Game. “However, I am sitting in my office laughing hysterically at this video. Am I an idiot, too? Maybe.”