While we know — both anecdotally and through first hand experience — that the Weekend Douche Parade in Philly has been aggressively trying to colonize Northern Liberties for a good few years now, its stronghold in Old City is still a force to be reckoned with. (And, as ever, its spiritual home remains in Rittenhouse Square, but times are tough, and even Rittenhouse has gotten too cool for the Douche Class in the last year or so.) According to our legal correspondent Conor Corcoran, there’s been no less than eight shootings in the last year in the immediate Old City bar/restaurant cluster — and the bulk of them have occurred, as you might guess, just after the bars let out. What is curious about a lot of these incidents — as well as probably hundreds of fights that go unreported or unnoticed by the local media — is that this is not really what we’ll call, for lack of a better term, “Thug Stuff.” Thug Stuff happens in the neighborhoods on the periphery of Center City, and usually over Actual Beef — or at any rate, not over spilled drink. By contrast, this latest shooting on Saturday night involved Temple University grad student Gerald Ung (pictured), who allegedly shot Villanova graduate Ed DiDonato over an altercation that began when one of them was doing pull-ups on a piece of scaffolding. After the shooting, Ung did not flee the scene; rather, he’s seen on Fox29 security footage on his cell phone in the immediate aftermath. We don’t know what this all means, really. We know that, unlike real life Thugs, we remain patently unafraid of the Douche Class, and their never-ending You Spilled My Drink Wars. Even though, in this case, a man was critically injured, we don’t really feel like any of this is real; nor do we feel any particular sympathy for the participants. (Nor, would it seem, do many others: As of this writing, the Facebook group “Gerald Ung Is Innocent” contains a whopping five members.) Who do we feel bad for? Old City Merchants, many of whom don’t cater to the Douche Class clientele but wind up having to clean up their messes (and suffer lost business) anyway. So if we may pass along a little advice: Don’t be afraid to patronize Old City businesses. It’s like the mafia: In all likelihood, a douchebag probably isn’t going to shoot you unless you’re a douchebag yourself.

Fox 29 clip of the shooting and its aftermath after the jump.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 1:48 pm.