Brandi Reads: The Berenstain Bears Lost In Cyberspace
This is the second installment of a three part story. Read Part I.
II. A Catfishing To Remember
At one point, Teacher Bob has some real-talk with the cubs about internet safety. He gives them a lot of rules and, of course, several cubs ignore them.
Let’s have a look at the rules:
The first rule should probably be: “Don’t use your real name for your email address” but instead it’s just don’t tell anyone in the chat room your personal information. Remember when people didn’t use their real names for social media? Thanks Zuckerberg.
It’s pretty hard to ask your parents about meeting someone from a chatroom when they have no idea what a chatroom is (because the school neglected to explain any part of this experiment to them) or they’re just not around.
Anyway, Babs Bruno shows this list to her dad, Police Chief Bruno and he stresses how important it is for cubs to stay safe on the internet. So I guess someone’s dad is home.
But Queenie McBear does not care about these rules.
Queenie McBear has a cousin named Bermuda who had been online for years and is allowed to date. She used Big Date! (“the biggest dating site in cyberspace”). Bermuda pressures Queenie into dressing older and trying internet dating.
Toot-toot! All aboard the question train!
How old is Bermuda? Is she over 18? There were not teen dating sites, per say. You just went to a chat room. She’s allowed to date but are her parents okay with her meeting strangers from the internet? I need more of a backstory on Bermuda and her hip, mature, fast cub life.
Bermuda accompanies Queenie to meet a boy from the internet at Pizza Shack.
“He said he was very tall and he’d be wearing a really sharp suit, a wide-brimmed hat, and a stud in his nose,” said Bermuda as she scanned the busy Pizza Shack scene. “Do you see anybody that looks like that? (69)”
They found the guy and he turned out to be Too-Tall in disguise. His gang dared him to “computer-date an older girl.”
Queenie and Too-Tall (and his wing-bear friends) all have a good laugh about this mix-up and go on their merry way to Burger Bear, where the younger cubs hang out, having learned that the worst thing that could happen to you if you meet strangers from the internet is that they could be your current boo. It doesn’t say that’s the lesson they learned but it’s the only one I could find.
Initially, Bermuda was pissed. She thought that she’d been set up by Queenie but then she realized it was all an innocent mistake and she went off to find her own date. Congrats on not getting murdered, kids.
Onward to Part III: Crime!
