Who comes up with this stuff? Does anyone know? I’m guessing that it started off with someone taking random photos of party casualties draped over various objects, and it progressed from there. Soon, like a bolt of lightning, came the call from on high: Let us go forth into the world and strew ourselves across the landscape in bizarre postures, capturing images of our escapades for posterity.
Well, it at least sounds like a suitably silly explanation, for equally inane fads. Planking, owling, and coning are in many ways products of a multimedia culture with entirely too much time and technology on its hands. Planking (purists insist the proper term is extreme lying down) and coning literally encourage participants to strike a pose for the camera, while coning requires some additional daring and some video. In any case, I think it’s all stupid, and I’ll tell you why. In fact, I’ll give you ten reasons why planking, owling and coning are stupid:
- Let me start off by saying that as an ice cream enthusiast, I find coning to be a tragic misuse of valuable resources. Who could be so blithe, so alarmingly cavalier about the blatant abuse of one’s dessert?
- Isn’t extreme lying down, which is no doubt one of the root causes of obesity, something we should be discouraging? It seems like we’re headed in the wrong direction as a species when an activity that consists of, well, a complete lack of activity is all the rage.
- Compounding the fact that owling and planking unabashedly encourage blatant idleness is the flip side of these fads. That is, their entire attraction is predicated upon what, exactly? You guessed it – viewing this inactivity for its entertainment value while sitting idly at your computer. But I have to give it up for this guy:
- Call me a bleeding heart, but there is something perversely insensitive about creating a fad that promotes wasting food when people are starving elsewhere. It’s just ice cream, you say, what’s the big deal? Just remember: today it’s coning; tomorrow, it may be bunning. Think about it.
- Since when are owls known to perch as though they were squatting to pee, anyway? And by the way, what’s the idea of attributing this nonsensical behavior to a bird that has traditionally been associated with wisdom? In the words of comedian Bill Engvall, Here’s your sign:
- Apart from the aforementioned wasting of perfectly good desserts, these coning clowns are forcing the rest of us to wait in line at the drive-thru even longer than usual. This should be a capitol offense.
- Seeing how the “art” of planking is based in part on the level of difficulty and selecting a challenging – even dangerous – location, it’s only a matter of time before First Responders are summoned to rescue someone who went just a little too far …
- Speaking of emergency personnel, one can only imagine what it would be like to be the first on the scene in the scenario depicted below. Has Granny fallen, and can’t get up? Is she doing her impression of a Thanksgiving turkey? Or worse, has she fallen victim to some mindless trend that shows no respect for age, gender or self-image?
- Tragically, it would appear there is no segment of our society whose dignity and stoicism place them beyond the grasp of this insidious disease called planking …
- Of course, it was inevitable that someone would pay the ultimate price for their participation in this craze. Seriously, a picture may be worth a thousand words … but it isn’t worth a single life.
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