Extreme sports for the obesity generation.

Seriously, we've been hearing for some years now how all the kids are horribly fat from eating too many chips. That's why the last generation invented Parkour and Base Jumping, and this generation has invented Planking.

Did you think they were going to invent some kind of game that involved running around?

It must be great being you...

...not having the memory of ever having done anything stupid in your life.

Personally, I'm sure I've done lots of things that were stupid and / or dangerous whilst young / drunk, most often probably without even realising it at the time. The difference between me and this particular individual probably comes down to something as simple as I was lucky and he was not. Just because I have no explicit recollection of these things doesn't make me perfect or infallible.

It might not take a fool to spot a fool, but it also doesn't take a callous hubristic fool to spot another.

Re: gloating

Is it good or bad that the moderators let these gloating remarks through? Do I need to be constantly reminded that there is a large section of the public whose natural reaction to a child being run over, for example, is to laugh, gloat and blame the victim for being "stupid", and that a lot of these people read The Register?

Incidentally, it may be the case that intelligent people are more likely to be killed in some classes of accident. When young, they are more likely to circumvent safety measures and do something unexpected and original. When older, they are more likely to suffer from repetition fatigue. I've been present at some near misses involving people of Oxbridge-level intelligence, with and without alcohol.

I'm not sure how gloating correlates with intelligence. Perhaps the more intelligent gloaters are aware enough at least to understand how socially acceptable their behaviour is and to limit themselves to doing it anonymously.

I believe so.

Sometimes, even by falling off of high things.

I contend that this particular individual died because he was drunk and foolish, the fact that he was 'planking' whilst drunk and foolish may have contributed to it, but was not the only cause. Accidents tend to happen when people are drunk, as it affects things like judgement and balance, both of which are vitally important to not falling off the aforementioned high things.

The separate case of the guy being arrested because of 'planking' on a police car; as mentioned by another poster above, the police are quite likely to arrest you if you site/lie/jump/plank on top of a police car, what with there being a law against it.

As to where Facebook comes in all this? The easy answer: it doesn't. The supposed link between the 'craze' on FB, and an unfortunate drunken 20 year old losing his life is so tenuous as to be non-existent.

It's called "graveyard humour".

In case you haven't noticed, short pain-filled lives followed by violent unpleasant deaths has been the lot of the greater part of humanity since the beginning of recorded time, and a good deal before then too. It's the human condition, and morbid humour is one of our time-tested coping mechanisms. It's not actually as vindictive as it may come across.

@ Ashamed AC

I think you need to take a bit of a reality pill there, and think about why you feel that your grief jockey platitudes are in some way less shameful that others' poor humour and disdain.

You need to accept that there are two issues here, one is that a human being has died - which is itself generally a bad thing, with all the inherent baggage that comes with lost life.

However the other aspect is that a supposedly intelligent being has managed to kill themselves by stupidly carrying out a truly absurdly idiotic action as part of a completely pointless escapade. This is worthy of note and ridicule.

Look at this way, if the bloke had simply broken a few bones we would all be merrily chortling away and only the most puritan of grief-jockeys would be admonishing anyone for doing so. The only difference here is the seriousness (I was going to say "gravity" - but you would probably get all mardy about that) of the result.

Yes it is very much a shame that someone has been killed, but the manner and circumstances are in isolation, funny.