Planking – Finally stupidity takes its toll

Apologies in advance for the massive wall of text, but this topic is really pissing me off and I need to vent.

Here in Australia, over recent months a craze called planking has really taken off. For those of you who are unfamiliar with it (you’re definitely not from Australia), it is the act of lying on an object or between 2 objects etc. in a perfectly horizontal position, and obviously you’ll want someone to take a picture so you can post it on Facebook to impress all your mates. I first found out about it when my workmates started planking in between cars at work and on the hot water system out the back of work and what not, I didn’t really think much of it, I definitely didn’t realise it was the latest social phenomenon. But I recently found out there’s a planking fan page on Facebook with over 85,000 followers (last I heard) and its support is growing by the hour, with other planking tribute pages being made for other countries.

Naturally with this sort of behaviour there is an element of one upmanship that will inevitably be brought into the picture. The way I understand it, people gain more respect from the planking community (a fine group of well educated, sobriety enthusiasts I’m sure) by planking in dangerous or illegal places. Some dude got charged with trespassing on police property after he planked on a police car, I don’t know if the above picture is of that incident but you get the idea. Inevitably when something gets turned into a competition people are going to get upset or hurt trying to outdo their fellow competitors. On the 15^th of this month at about 4:30 am, what may be the world’s first planking death occurred, a bloke by the name of Acton Beale.

He had been out on the town drinking with mates and was planking on the way home. When they got home he decided to plank, while drunk, on a 5 cm wide balcony rail…of a seventh story apartment. Am I the only one that sees this as being barely worthy of 100 words in the paper? We don’t hear about every drunken death that occurs as the result of stupidity and nor should we. Planking is not something I can endorse, but hey to each their own. What really pisses me off is the fact all and sundry seem to think this craze is cool. Well, fuck you, it isn’t. Neither is it a tragedy that some drunken fool fell off a balcony while trying to balance on a 5cm wide rail. If he had been drunk driving and crashed into a tree killing only himself we as society would shake our heads and view him as a reckless fool with poor judgement and that it was a blessing nobody else was hurt. We should not be getting up in arms over this, I probably should have died a few times due to some questionable (read: stupid) decisions I’ve made while both drunk and sober. And you know what; if I had, I would have deserved it.

Here’s the next social trend I’m going to be starting up for all the retarded sheep, sorry I mean hilarious pranksters, out there. Let’s all stand over power points, downed power lines, electric fences and the like and urinate in short bursts onto them, don’t worry if they’re just short bursts and the stream never directly connects your body to the source of electricity you'll be fine. DON’T GET KILLED, OTHERWISE PEOPLE WILL MISTAKE THIS FOR A BAD IDEA. Obviously you’ll need to have someone video you doing this if you want internet respect, get on board. Planking is for pussies, let’s play Electrical Urination Roulette.