OUR VIEW: Planks, but no planks

Planking, hunkering, owling — no matter what you call it, it really just boils down to what happens when a bunch of bored people, who don’t drink or do drugs, get together and look for ways to entertain themselves. Stoners like to sit on the couch and play video games. Some of us have roommates who like to overdose on Mountain Dew or Rockstar and shoot pool for seven hours straight. Others, still, like to read books into the wee hours of the night. Plankers find solace in stiffening their bodies into horizontal positions and lay in weird places for extended lengths of time.

Questions such as, “Is this a sport? Are these people for real? Why not a nice game of Monopoly?” come to surface. The simple fact that the concept of planking managed to work itself into a feature story in The Utah Statesman shows, at least a little, that the activity is to some extent, legitimately viewed as a way to pass the time — another question we could ask is, “When do these fearsome athletes find the time to study for classes?”

However long planking has been around — and consequently begun to gather popularity — doesn’t matter. The more important focus will be on how long it actually survives — chances are this fad’s wick will burn up faster that it ignited. Prior to the unfortunate death of one planker, who took his performance too far and fell seven storeys to his death, plankers could have at least argued their activity was, for all intents and purposes, safe. Now, this is not the case. It now seems that smoking pot and sitting on the couch playing “Halo” all day long is the safer activity. At least nobody has ever died as the direct result of smoking marijuana. This isn’t to say that mixing drugs and planking is risk free. The Statesman is not suggesting that anybody smoke pot or plank from a seventh-storey window. We are, however, suggesting that before rounding up a group of semi-close acquaintances to go plank your nearest supermarket, cemetery or Aggie Bull, think about the more productive alternatives you may have at your disposal.