Planking, owling, tarsiering, WTF! - Manila Bulleting Online
Planking, owling, tarsiering, WTF!
MANILA, Philippines -- Everybody seems to be doing it.
Local celebrities like Xian Lim and Matteo Guidicelli have been spotted doing it at the Hong Kong International Airport.
Playboy founder Hugh Hefner has done it, and so have his infamous Playboy Bunnies.
Dollhouse star Eliza Dushku did it while building a trauma and healing rehabilitation center for Uganda's child soldiers.
Even Max Key, the 16-year-old son of New Zealand's Prime Minister, John Key, has been caught doing it right in front of his father.
What all these people have been doing is planking, a worldwide craze that involves lying face down, palms flat against one's sides, and feet together and pointing at the floor, at the most unusual and incongruous locations. Photos have to be taken, of course, and uploaded in Facebook groups that have sprouted all over the internet.
The Philippines is the latest country to take on the craze. Proof are the more than 65,000 members to the Planking Pinas Facebook group, which just established last month, with some members living as far away as Tarlac. There are even planking groups on Facebook dedicated to particular institutions, such as the ones in De La Salle University-Manila and Ateneo de Manila University.
How exactly did planking begin and become an international phenomenon? Is its end anywhere in sight?
The Lying Down Game
As simple as the rules to planking are, untangling its origins and its spread across the globe requires a little more work. Three people claim to have started the craze, one of them being comedian Tom Green, who alleged in a CNN interview that he invented the game as early as 1994.
However, both The Guardian, Wikipedia, and the website KnowYourMeme.com point to Englishmen Gary Clarkson and Christian Langdon as the originators of the game back in 2000.
According to The Guardian, then 15-year-old Clarkson and 12-year-old Langdon would perform in public the plank then known as the Lying Down Game as a way to pass the time.
The Guardian even quotes Clarkson as saying that planking was just a really stupid, random thing to do.
But when the two of them, along with friend Daniel Hoppin, started a Facebook group, the Lying Down Game grew into an international craze, with people sending in photos from all over the world.
Death by Planking
By 2008, a New Zealander named Paul Carran would coin the term planking.
By 2009, planking got its first mention in mainstream media when seven doctors and nurses working at a hospital in England were suspended while planking on duty.
By May of this year, planking had its first death in Acton Beale, a 20-year-old Australian who fell from a seventh-floor balcony in Brisbane, Australia.
Beale's death put a bit of a damper on the planking, as it prompted comment from as high up as Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who warned plankers that their focus has to be on keeping yourself safe first.''
Racist?
Planking has also come under fire for purportedly being racist, a claim first raised by rapper Xzibit and lent credence to by University of Pittsburgh professor Markcus Rediker. Rediker, who also wrote the book The Slave Ship: A Human History, told the Washington Post that the game has painful connections to the slave trade.
To plank was not necessarily a verb used by slave ship merchants and captains...but the planks of the lower deck are precisely where millions of Africans were forced to lie and sleep...in conditions of utter horror that defy description, explains Rediker in the Washington Post interview. No matter what the intention of the founders of the recent fad, there is a connection to the slave trade and it is a painful one.
Filipino Plankers
However, planking in the country has arrived with no such baggage, or at least it hasn't for 38-year-old graphic designer Jeffrey Estaris Just like Clarkson and Langdon, Estaris simply thinks of planking as just another way to pass the time.
My co-workers were looking at planking photos on Facebook a few months ago. Since we were all curious if we could do it, we started planking - in the office, on top of the cubicle dividers, etc. he recalls.
Estaris attributes planking's popularity to its simplicity and how it is up to the planker to make the act interesting.
Planking isn't complicated, in the sense that you don't need to re-wire your brain to do it and there are no rules. The planker himself makes the act interesting and ups the ante on the 'difficulty' by choosing odd locations to plank on, he says. But not everyone is amused at the sight of plankers on the net or in real life. And so you get plankers who 'justify' their planking by referring to it as a form of expression/ rebellion. For me, it's fun. I can do it. Period.
Owling and Horsemaning
But even as planking takes hold in the minds of young Filipinos, there are already challengers to planking's popularity.
Last month, photos started appearing of people owling, which involves sitting on a perched position while looking off into the distance.
The new fad already has a celebrity endorsing it in the form of actress and young adult author Hillary Duff, who posted a photo of her owling on her Twitter page.
Horsemaning, on the other hand, is a more elaborate fad involving two people based on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
One participant poses in such a way to make it appear that he is headless, while his companion poses nearby with only his head visible, to give the impression that the head belongs to the original, apparently headless body.
Pinoy Style
Estaris is not worried, as he himself is pioneering what he feels is a uniquely Filipino twist on the planking craze tarsiering.
My co-workers and I have moved on to our own version and we think it's very Pinoy -- we call it tarsiering. Tarsiering is something I thought of when I heard about owling, he says. We were joking around and decided to have a Pinoy version of the new fad. You just have to find a pole or anywhere you can hang on using your arms and legs, just like how tarsiers do on branches.
Comments
Post a Comment