Planking Craze. Lol.
The lying down game (also known as planking, or face downs) is an activity, popular in various parts of the world, consisting of lying face down in an unusual or incongruous location. The hands must touch the sides of the body, and having a photograph of the participant taken and posted on the Internet is an integral part of the game. Players compete to find the most unusual and original location in which to play. The location should also be as public as possible, and as many people as possible should be involved.
The lying down game spread to the rest of the world where it has also been known as "시체놀이" ("playing dead") (2003,South Korea), "à plat ventre" ("On one’s belly", France 2004), "extreme lying down", (2008, Australasia) "facedowns" (2010, USA and Ireland), and Planking (2011, Australia & New Zealand and worldwide). Many participants of planking since 2011 have photographed the activity on unusual locations such as atop poles, roofs and vehicles, while some "plankers" engage in the activity by planking only their upper body and feet while leaving the back suspended.
The term "planking" was coined in Australia and the practice became a fad in 2011. Planking is described as the practice of lying down flat with arms to the side , to mimic a wooden plank. It has its origins in the "lying down game".
Three people plank the Taj Mahal
Planking the street lightsOn 13 May 2011, a 20-year-old man from Gladstone in central Queensland was charged for allegedly planking on a police vehicle. Popular planking locations include park benches and other public places. On 15 May 2011, Acton Beale, a 20-year-old man, plunged to his death after reportedly "planking" on a seventh-floor balcony in Brisbane, Australia. Beale became the first known casualty of the planking fad.
Acton Beale's friends have accused Paul Carran, a New Zealander living in Sydney who claims to have invented planking in 2008, of bearing responsibility for Beale's death by promoting planking. Australia's Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, warned plankers that the "focus has to be on keeping yourself safe first". The Queensland Opposition and the state's police have called for people to stop participating in the fad.
On 29 May 2011, Max Key, son of New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, uploaded a photograph to Facebook of himself planking on a lounge suite, his father standing behind him. After the photograph was reproduced on the front page of the New Zealand Herald two days later, the Prime Minister's office initially declined comment, but later that day, confirming that the photograph was indeed genuine, Mr. Key remarked that he doesn't see anything wrong with planking when done safely, and that it was he who had actually introduced Max to planking in the first place, having seen a video of the phenomenon on YouTube.
Related article about Planking.
On the off chance that you lead a remotely fulfilling life and were busy working, studying, or having sex—even alone—on Wednesday, you may have missed the “First Annual Global Planking Day” and been none the worse for it.
You might even be one of the rare souls lucky enough never to have heard of “planking.” I sincerely regret being the messenger who delivers the bad news to you, because even learning about it will render you permanently less intelligent.
Here’s the simplest definition I’ve found:
One could strain with all their might and still be unable to conceive of things more meaninglessly self-abasing than lying face-down to get some thumbs-up, but we live in desperately meaningless times. And it’s not as if there weren’t stupid teen crazes of yore. Train-surfing wasn’t the brightest of ideas, yet at least it carried a subtext of poverty, bravery, and danger. It also required a modicum of athletic skill. Pole-sitting was a goofy American fad in the Roaring Twenties before the Great Depression came along and replaced it with a goofier fad of stockbrokers jumping from skyscraper ledges. But even pole-sitting derived from a long historical tradition of column-sitting that went all the way back to fifth-century ascetic St. Simeon Stylites, who was reputed to have sat on a small platform atop a pillar in Turkey for 37 years. As superficially idiotic as that sounds—which is “very”—such feats involved tremendous physical endurance and, however feverishly misguided, some huge scoops of spiritual dedication. They definitely required more chutzpah and effort than lying still on a park bench for five seconds while your best friend captures it on his iPhone.
Modern planking seems to have derived from what was known as the “lying down game” in Europe and Japan during the late 1990s. In the early 2000s, the French referred to the practice as “on one’s belly” and South Koreans as “playing dead.” Around 2007 or so, a New Zealander named Paul Carran rechristened it as “extreme lying down.” More recently, Aussies adopted the trend as their own and called it “planking.” Of late, the practice has gone viral as if it were some form of autistic measles. At last count, Facebook’s Official Planking page has received a quarter-million “like” votes. There are numerous other planking pages with healthy membership rolls where exuberant youngsters upload photos of themselves lying face-down on their front lawns and in return receive emotional stroking in the form of thumbs-up votes and comments such as “sic plank, brah” and “sweet planking skills!” and “LOL! Awesome plank!!!!” The craze has also spawned anti-planking pages such as Kick the shit out of a ‘Planker’ day and Plankers are Wankers.
But sometimes when people try to act stiff, they wind up turning into stiffs. In at least one known case, planking has proved to be fatal when combined with alcohol and misguided bravado. Around 4:30AM on May 15th, after what was described as a mischief-filled night of planking at “various spots,” an allegedly drunken 20-year-old Aussie named Acton Beale attempted to plank on an apartment balcony in Brisbane but instead fell seven stories to his death. Ginger-haired Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard subsequently appeared on television to urge Oz’s kids to at least show some sensibility and restraint if they couldn’t help themselves from planking. Some of Beale’s friends, failing to concede that their recently departed mate got drunk and did something dumb, have publicly blamed Paul Carran, the Kiwi advocate of “extreme lying down,” for Beale’s death. Others blamed “the media.”
At least in death, Acton Beale was spared the lifelong embarrassment he’d have faced if, say, he’d only fallen from two stories and wound up paralyzed from the neck down. Imagine him feeling the burn twenty years from now as he explains to youngsters that he’s forced to eat all his meals through a straw because of a planking accident, and they ask, “What’s ‘planking’?” As he was falling to his death, what was he thinking? Did it all happen so quickly, he had no time to think? Most importantly, did he reproach himself in any way? At any time did he think, “Wow, I’m an idiot”?
Maybe it’s more of an argument against drinking than planking. Way Down Under last Saturday night, while drinking and trying to demonstrate that planking was still safe even in the highly publicized wake of Acton Beale’s death, a 48-year-old Sydney woman identified simply as “Claudia” ascended a six-foot-high garden wall and then accidentally fell to the ground, suffering arm, shoulder, and head injuries. Before assaying the six-foot wall, a wide-eyed and tipsy Claudia was photographed holding a wine bottle and planking from a shiny black designer stool. Claudia’s apparently unsympathetic female friend told a reporter: “Planking came up and we were discussing how stupid it was, how silly….We were just making light of it and we balanced on a little stool. Then it went a little further…it was all started with why you don’t plank—and look what happened.”
Yes, I’m looking. I’m looking, but I’m not liking. I’m looking at one dull row of planking photos after the next, all of them featuring copycat morons frozen in a receptive, sodomy-awaiting position. I’m looking at a trend that is provocative in its idiocy, something that I’d like to ignore but that extracts the sticky sap of contempt from my pores even against my will. I’m looking at a future where copycat psycho-plankers try to outdo each other’s deaths. And maybe I’m overlooking the tens of thousands of idiots who are doing it safely, but who cares about them? Unless they fall on someone else and crush them, plankers are only hurting themselves, either in a literal physical sense or in terms of a dignity irrevocably lost even after the first planking incident.
Is it wrong to hope for more planking deaths? By any reasonable ethical standard, I suppose it is.
It’s happening all around the world: people are taking pictures of their friends awkwardly lying face-down in all sorts of unlikely places. On top of statues, in the middle of roads, in front of famous landmarks – absolutely anywhere you can conceivably fit a horizontal human body, you’ll find someone playing the bizarre game. The weirder the place and the more people looking on, the better. You may ask why, but the people behind The Lying Down Game would rather ask “Why not?”
Lying Down Game creators Gary Clarkson and Christian Langdon describe their creation as “Parkour…for those who can’t be arsed.” In other words, this is the lazy person’s urban navigation sport. There’s no dangerous jumping or athletic climbing required; just the ability to lie down and stop moving for a moment along with the bravery to tolerate people staring at you as if you are crazy.
Feel brave enough to participate? The rules are simple, according to the creators: “1) The more public the better. 2) The more people involved the better. Please be aware that the palms of your hands must be flat against your side and the tips of your toes pointing at the ground. Just as if you were standing, but vertically challenged. FACE DOWN!”
The game has been around as a Facebook group since 2006, but the meme really reached its peak in the summer of 2009. Mainstream media picked up on the story and the game was featured by news outlets around the world. After the attention, participation soared and the submitted pictures grew more and more outrageous. The game was at the center of a few controversies as people were caught lying down at work and in some rather unwise places, but lying down enthusiasts continued to play.
Aside from being a silly thing to do to amuse yourself, the Lying Down Game strikes us as a brilliant public art project. Seen separately, these photos suggest thousands of weird people all willing to do something a little crazy. But taken together, the photos of people all around the world lying face down in odd locations looks a lot like collective performance art. It helps that they all seem to be having fun while lying down.
The Facebook page for the group is still going strong after all this time, and it has now reached well over 100,000 members. Want to play? Be prepared for some stares and the occasional “Are you alright?” – and don’t forget to bring a friend with a camera to capture the ridiculous places you find to lie down in.
Here are some of the videos of Planking Craze. Enjoy! Lol.
Even Blake Griffin couldn't resist Planking. Lol.
Dwight Howard and his gang of goofballs are into Planking. Lol.
History
The lying down game is claimed to have been invented by Gary Clarkson and Christian Langdon in 1997 It first became popular in North East England, then all of Britain by the summer of 2009 reaching the point by late 2010 where it was described by Andrew Sullivan as "sweeping Britain". The game made news in September 2009, when seven doctors and nurses working at the Great Western Hospital in Swindon, England were suspended for playing the lying down game while on duty. The game has been described by some as "pointless" and as "Parkour for those who can’t be arsed". Similarly, in the USA, a student group from Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis held a flashmob-style mass game and posted clips of the event and passers'-by reactions on YouTube, referring to the event simply as "lazy parkour".The lying down game spread to the rest of the world where it has also been known as "시체놀이" ("playing dead") (2003,South Korea), "à plat ventre" ("On one’s belly", France 2004), "extreme lying down", (2008, Australasia) "facedowns" (2010, USA and Ireland), and Planking (2011, Australia & New Zealand and worldwide). Many participants of planking since 2011 have photographed the activity on unusual locations such as atop poles, roofs and vehicles, while some "plankers" engage in the activity by planking only their upper body and feet while leaving the back suspended.
Planking
Acton Beale's friends have accused Paul Carran, a New Zealander living in Sydney who claims to have invented planking in 2008, of bearing responsibility for Beale's death by promoting planking. Australia's Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, warned plankers that the "focus has to be on keeping yourself safe first". The Queensland Opposition and the state's police have called for people to stop participating in the fad.
On 29 May 2011, Max Key, son of New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, uploaded a photograph to Facebook of himself planking on a lounge suite, his father standing behind him. After the photograph was reproduced on the front page of the New Zealand Herald two days later, the Prime Minister's office initially declined comment, but later that day, confirming that the photograph was indeed genuine, Mr. Key remarked that he doesn't see anything wrong with planking when done safely, and that it was he who had actually introduced Max to planking in the first place, having seen a video of the phenomenon on YouTube.
Related article about Planking.
You might even be one of the rare souls lucky enough never to have heard of “planking.” I sincerely regret being the messenger who delivers the bad news to you, because even learning about it will render you permanently less intelligent.
Here’s the simplest definition I’ve found:
Planking is the practice of lying down flat as if to mimic a wooden plank.A more complicated explication that still fails to make it sound any smarter:
A fast-spreading global fad, planking involves people being photographed while lying face-down in a public place and posting the images on the Internet.Helpful instructions for the would-be planker:
Lie face down, straight as a board, pointed toes, arms to the side with straight pointed fingers. The planker’s face must remain expressionless, head held straight, not turned. Pretend as if rigor mortis has set in.If on some lonely afternoon I were to find myself in such a position, I would wish for rigor mortis to set in. Another plankophile described the practice as “pretty much active lying down.” Yeah, pretty much. “It’s the most fun you can have while being still,” enthused an Australian plankster on Facebook. If that’s the case, I imagine being stillborn must feel like attending the Mardi Gras.
“Of late, the practice has gone viral as if it were some form of autistic measles.”
Still, on Wednesday, people across this vast blue orb who display flashes of intelligence in other areas—mainly computer programming and social media—celebrated First Annual Global Planking Day by doing stupid things such as lying flat on basketball hoops, balcony railings, and kitchen counters, having someone photograph it, and uploading the results online.One could strain with all their might and still be unable to conceive of things more meaninglessly self-abasing than lying face-down to get some thumbs-up, but we live in desperately meaningless times. And it’s not as if there weren’t stupid teen crazes of yore. Train-surfing wasn’t the brightest of ideas, yet at least it carried a subtext of poverty, bravery, and danger. It also required a modicum of athletic skill. Pole-sitting was a goofy American fad in the Roaring Twenties before the Great Depression came along and replaced it with a goofier fad of stockbrokers jumping from skyscraper ledges. But even pole-sitting derived from a long historical tradition of column-sitting that went all the way back to fifth-century ascetic St. Simeon Stylites, who was reputed to have sat on a small platform atop a pillar in Turkey for 37 years. As superficially idiotic as that sounds—which is “very”—such feats involved tremendous physical endurance and, however feverishly misguided, some huge scoops of spiritual dedication. They definitely required more chutzpah and effort than lying still on a park bench for five seconds while your best friend captures it on his iPhone.
Modern planking seems to have derived from what was known as the “lying down game” in Europe and Japan during the late 1990s. In the early 2000s, the French referred to the practice as “on one’s belly” and South Koreans as “playing dead.” Around 2007 or so, a New Zealander named Paul Carran rechristened it as “extreme lying down.” More recently, Aussies adopted the trend as their own and called it “planking.” Of late, the practice has gone viral as if it were some form of autistic measles. At last count, Facebook’s Official Planking page has received a quarter-million “like” votes. There are numerous other planking pages with healthy membership rolls where exuberant youngsters upload photos of themselves lying face-down on their front lawns and in return receive emotional stroking in the form of thumbs-up votes and comments such as “sic plank, brah” and “sweet planking skills!” and “LOL! Awesome plank!!!!” The craze has also spawned anti-planking pages such as Kick the shit out of a ‘Planker’ day and Plankers are Wankers.
But sometimes when people try to act stiff, they wind up turning into stiffs. In at least one known case, planking has proved to be fatal when combined with alcohol and misguided bravado. Around 4:30AM on May 15th, after what was described as a mischief-filled night of planking at “various spots,” an allegedly drunken 20-year-old Aussie named Acton Beale attempted to plank on an apartment balcony in Brisbane but instead fell seven stories to his death. Ginger-haired Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard subsequently appeared on television to urge Oz’s kids to at least show some sensibility and restraint if they couldn’t help themselves from planking. Some of Beale’s friends, failing to concede that their recently departed mate got drunk and did something dumb, have publicly blamed Paul Carran, the Kiwi advocate of “extreme lying down,” for Beale’s death. Others blamed “the media.”
At least in death, Acton Beale was spared the lifelong embarrassment he’d have faced if, say, he’d only fallen from two stories and wound up paralyzed from the neck down. Imagine him feeling the burn twenty years from now as he explains to youngsters that he’s forced to eat all his meals through a straw because of a planking accident, and they ask, “What’s ‘planking’?” As he was falling to his death, what was he thinking? Did it all happen so quickly, he had no time to think? Most importantly, did he reproach himself in any way? At any time did he think, “Wow, I’m an idiot”?
Maybe it’s more of an argument against drinking than planking. Way Down Under last Saturday night, while drinking and trying to demonstrate that planking was still safe even in the highly publicized wake of Acton Beale’s death, a 48-year-old Sydney woman identified simply as “Claudia” ascended a six-foot-high garden wall and then accidentally fell to the ground, suffering arm, shoulder, and head injuries. Before assaying the six-foot wall, a wide-eyed and tipsy Claudia was photographed holding a wine bottle and planking from a shiny black designer stool. Claudia’s apparently unsympathetic female friend told a reporter: “Planking came up and we were discussing how stupid it was, how silly….We were just making light of it and we balanced on a little stool. Then it went a little further…it was all started with why you don’t plank—and look what happened.”
Yes, I’m looking. I’m looking, but I’m not liking. I’m looking at one dull row of planking photos after the next, all of them featuring copycat morons frozen in a receptive, sodomy-awaiting position. I’m looking at a trend that is provocative in its idiocy, something that I’d like to ignore but that extracts the sticky sap of contempt from my pores even against my will. I’m looking at a future where copycat psycho-plankers try to outdo each other’s deaths. And maybe I’m overlooking the tens of thousands of idiots who are doing it safely, but who cares about them? Unless they fall on someone else and crush them, plankers are only hurting themselves, either in a literal physical sense or in terms of a dignity irrevocably lost even after the first planking incident.
Is it wrong to hope for more planking deaths? By any reasonable ethical standard, I suppose it is.
Parkour for Lazies: The Bizarre British Lying Down Game
Lying Down Game creators Gary Clarkson and Christian Langdon describe their creation as “Parkour…for those who can’t be arsed.” In other words, this is the lazy person’s urban navigation sport. There’s no dangerous jumping or athletic climbing required; just the ability to lie down and stop moving for a moment along with the bravery to tolerate people staring at you as if you are crazy.
Feel brave enough to participate? The rules are simple, according to the creators: “1) The more public the better. 2) The more people involved the better. Please be aware that the palms of your hands must be flat against your side and the tips of your toes pointing at the ground. Just as if you were standing, but vertically challenged. FACE DOWN!”
The game has been around as a Facebook group since 2006, but the meme really reached its peak in the summer of 2009. Mainstream media picked up on the story and the game was featured by news outlets around the world. After the attention, participation soared and the submitted pictures grew more and more outrageous. The game was at the center of a few controversies as people were caught lying down at work and in some rather unwise places, but lying down enthusiasts continued to play.
Aside from being a silly thing to do to amuse yourself, the Lying Down Game strikes us as a brilliant public art project. Seen separately, these photos suggest thousands of weird people all willing to do something a little crazy. But taken together, the photos of people all around the world lying face down in odd locations looks a lot like collective performance art. It helps that they all seem to be having fun while lying down.
The Facebook page for the group is still going strong after all this time, and it has now reached well over 100,000 members. Want to play? Be prepared for some stares and the occasional “Are you alright?” – and don’t forget to bring a friend with a camera to capture the ridiculous places you find to lie down in.
Here are some of the videos of Planking Craze. Enjoy! Lol.
Even Blake Griffin couldn't resist Planking. Lol.
Dwight Howard and his gang of goofballs are into Planking. Lol.
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