Here’s the clip of the LOVE Park makeout session, which apparently came out today, just in time for Valentine’s Day! (Or, rather, for [x], where [x] is Christmas:Boxing Day::Presidents’ Day::[x]. Vice Presidents’ Day, maybe?)
Anyway, it’s pretty cute, so it’s worth a viewing. Uwishunu has more.
Hmm. Roberta Fallon notes an event in LOVE Park this Sunday which has an interesting premise: “THE LARGEST COLLECTION OF PEOPLE MAKING-OUT IN LOVE PARK… EVER!!” Oh, man, could it possibly beat the Giant Makeout of Skateboarders in 1998 andThe Kennedy Memorial Makeout in 1968?!
This commercial is for a new push of the campaign with a special Valentine’s Day twist. The filming takes place in LOVE Park and starts on one couple meeting at the Park. They immediately start kissing each other. The camera moves and we see another couple meeting and kissing . The camera continues to move and we see another kissing couple and another until we see a ridiculous number of couples all meeting and kissing at LOVE Park, as if everyone in Center City just stopped what they were doing and started making-out with each other.
Hooray, it’s like a high school dance right in Center City! The commercial’s being done by Ted Passon and the shoot begins at 11 a.m. and lasts ’til around 3 p.m. (It’s a one-take shoot, people! This is the Russian Ark of local tourism ads.)
The note says to be on time for the shoot, so I am ineligible to participate.
Update 2: This came from a share on Google Reader, but I didn’t notice Erica Palan also blogged about it on the PW Style Blog. Thanks for the heads up, Erica.
As far as I can remember, this is what precipitated the renovation of the park to make it “unskateboardable.” No, wait, that was just a bunch of suburban kids who pissed off John Street because they brought a major week-long event to the city (and were white). Well, whatever. Here’s the details from yesterday:
Cops said that the squabble reached a tipping point at about 3 p.m., when Stewart’s homeless girlfriend, Yvette Prince, slugged her rival in the head. The other woman, also homeless, jumped up and plunged a knife into Prince’s chest.
Prince, 45, died of her injuries at Hahnemann University Hospital at 4:54 p.m., investigators said. The unidentified stabber, who is in her 50s, was taken into police custody, but charges were not filed as of last night.
A shoutout to Philebrity and the Paine’s World benefit for Paine’s Park, the new skateboarding park planned for along the Schuylkill. While we’re always going to be a little sad LOVE Park isn’t the mecca it once was, we’ll take a real live skatepark as a consolation prize.
The YMD does the music in the above video, and is also playing the party ($22 at the door, 21+, buses running from/to Center City).
See the tentacled beast above? Fox will be bringing a replica of that monster to Love Park on Monday between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. It’s 12 feet high and 12 feet wide, and the press release lets us know, “THERE’S NO ESCAPE FROM THE HOT TENTACLE ACTION!”
The beast’s name is Yivo, the antagonist in the new (incredibly disappointing, sadly) Futurama movie, which comes out on DVD Tuesday. Yeah, who knows. Don’t try to escape the hot tentacle action; it’s clearly impossible.
Speaking of John Street, there’s a nice little screw you to him in the upcoming Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground, the 79th (I think) installment in the skateboarding video game series. And by “a nice little screw you,” I mean “a completely rendered version of the new LOVE Park that can be skateboarded on.”
See, suburban white kids? You can have you revenge on John Street after all. Well, you know, kinda. Hey, if you can’t do it in real life, then do it in a video game. I guess that works for Grand Theft Auto, too.
Very rarely do we get so much in just one short media appearance. Usually it takes at least a month — or, in Milton Street’s case, a career — of hilarity to approach the top of the Philadelphia Zeitgeist.
Melvin Fortune is a special case. The Philadelphia maintenance worker said only two sentences to the media all year, and yet those two sentences managed to get him a nod in Philadelphia Will Do’s People of the Year. (This most important award of them all!)
After pranksters poured a box of detergent into the Love Park fountain in early September, NBC 10 decided to focus on the bad side of the totally awesome prank, by interviewing a Fairmount Park commissioner who said it’d cost thousands to hose down Love Park and a woman from North Philly who said it was upsetting.
And then NBC 10 talked to maintenance worker Melvin Fortune:
“Keep your bubbles back at home. That’s the signal I’m trying to send to you.”
No sentence better explains Philadelphia, 2006, than “Keep your bubbles back at home.” Thank you, Melvin Fortune. (Who even inspired an anonymous commenter to adopt his persona as an angry conservative, for some reason.) And thank you, pranksters. If you ever want to share the details of your college-style prank that turned totally awesome with the world, you know who to contact.
Yes, someone saw two men pour a box of detergent into the Love Park fountain yesterday morning around 6 a.m., spreading bubbles all over the park and sending people into a frenzy. NBC 10 is all over it:
If you walked by Love Park early Monday morning, you might have thought it was snowing.
It wasn’t snow filling the fountain; it was soapsuds. [...]
While this may look comical, not everybody was laughing.
“I don’t think it’s fair to the city or to the tourists who take pictures here at Love Park,” said Blayney Stukes, of North Philadelphia.
The Fairmount Park commissioner isn’t laughing either. He said it could cost thousands to cleanup the fountain, a bill that taxpayers will have to pick up.
“Keep your bubbles back at home. That’s the signal I’m trying to send to you,” maintenance worker Melvin Fortune said.
Hmm. Roberta Fallon 
