'Coning' is the new (and more delicious) planking

It's the kind of question every father of a 16-year-old son fears:

"Dad, have you ever heard of coning?"

It used to be, "Can I borrow the car keys?" Now it's questions about random bits of pop culture.

Get it right and you look like a too-cool, Ed Hardy-wearing dad who doesn't know how to act his age. Get it wrong and you're the out-of-touch geezer who gets way too excited about a double-header of "Jeopardy" and "Wheel of Fortune."

I chose the latter.

"No, Brian. What's coning?"

"Coning is the new planking."

That helped a lot. I knew about planking.

For the uninitiated, planking is the act of laying down straight as a wooden plank with arms at your side on top of a public object while someone snaps a photo. The stranger the object used for a perch, the better. The more difficult the placement, the cooler the planking. The photographic evidence is crucial. To borrow a phrase, if a planking happens in a forest and no one is there to shoot it, it never really happened.

For a few laughs, go ahead and waste a few moments by running the term through a photo search engine. You'll see goofballs laying on top of statues, on an empty shelf in a grocery store milk freezer, in between two NASCAR race cars. I saw one where a guy bridged the humps on two camels that were taking a siesta. Another got on top of a helicopter's rotor blade.

It's pointless and stupid and, when done well, entirely hilarious.

Planking is a distant prank cousin to forking, in which hundreds of white plastic forks are embedded tines-up in someone's lawn. Think of it as a miniature Forkhenge.

Coning takes the joke and makes the stunt less redeeming but more edible.

Here's the way it goes: A customer orders an ice cream cone at a fast-food drive-thru. Unsuspecting fast food employee attempts to hand the cone to the customer. Customer grabs only the cold ice cream, jams it in his mouth and drives off, leaving the drive-thru employing holding the cone.

Told you it was stupid. Real frat boy stuff.

Where it turns into borderline performance art is in the variations. In one You Tube video, a driver takes out a spoon, drizzles some chocolate and starts dining on the ice cream at the window as the worker holds the cone. In another, he hands a cone purchased at another restaurant to the employee and takes the new one before driving off. My favorite: the driver takes two fingers, dips them in the ice cream, smears them on his cheek like war paint, leaves the cone behind.

figitzieba: girls holding hands clip art

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