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Planking, Forever Alone flashmob and Bear Grylls: Memes of the week

May 20, 2011 / 1:53 PM EDT / CBS News

Planking in the kitchen Twitpic by @ZiedZ

Presented by Cheezburger Planking Acton Beale, a 20-year-old from Brisbane, Australia, fell to his death on Sunday attempting to perform a photo fad called "planking" off a 7th story balcony. The fad is actually a variation of an older meme called the "lying down game," a mass participatory game where the subject lays face down as rigidly as possible with their arms to their sides and is photographed so the image can be posted online for others to see. It became increasingly popular in Australia after a rugby player, David "Wolfman" Williams, planked during a rugby match last March.

Acton Beale | Planking | Rugby Plank

Forever Alone Flashmob Back in March, an Anonymous group started plotting an "involuntary" flashmob event by creating fake profiles on dating sites and setting up a false rendezvous at the Times Square, New York City at 7:30pm on May 13th. More specifically, they all met by the payphones on the corner of 46th and Broadway under a CCTV camera open to public access online. Fast forward to last Friday at 7:30pm: The Earthcam website became temporarily unavailable due to high traffice volume (almost doubled according to Quantcast) and a number of loiterers on the corner were identified as prank victims by IRL spectators. KYM Reporter Don interviews a Forever Alone victim! Know Your Meme Matt's Marriage Proposal (via Movie Trailer) "Greatest Marriage Proposal EVER!!!" is a YouTube video uploaded by Matt Still, a guy from Henry County, Georgia who proposed to his girlfriend Ginny Joiner at a movie theater with a custom-made film trailer. Shot inside the movie theater, The clip simultaneously shows a trailer featuring Matt Still as the protagonist, as well as Joiner's live reaction as she discovers her boyfriend's elaborate wedding proposal. In the first 3 days of upload, the video gained over 4.8 million views (and growing). Know your Meme

On Twitter: Bear Grylls Bear Grylls has been the subject of a popular pee drinking Internet joke since September of last year. This week he acknowledged the meme for the first time, and posted a picture of himself sipping out of a teacup in a tweet about drinking his own pee. It received an overwhelmingly positive reaction from the Reddit community, and was voted up to the front page within a few hours. Interestingly enough, the next tweet to come out of Bear Grylls account was a link to a preorder page for his soon to be released book, Mud, Sweat and Tears.

The first Bear Grylls pee drinking image | Bear Grylls Twitpic

Abroad: Shoshu-Riki (Toilet deodorizer commercial) Meanwhile in Japan, a recently-aired "toilet deodorizer" commercial craze for parodies and remixes on the video-sharing site Nico Nico Douga. The ad begins with a Portugese boy singing a tune on a street corn and ends abrutly with the boy singing the brand name "Shoshu-Riki!" Since its upload on April 22nd, the commercial led to over 600 "Utatte Mita" (I've tried singing it) covers and remixes uploaded by community members.

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Dat Ash A Brazilian image meme called "Ash Pedreiro", a re-imagined Ash Ketchum from Pokemon with lewd Pokemon sex-pun captions, managed to cross international boundaries to become the English speaking version "Dat Ash". It appears to have received the biggest push from the Cheezburger network Meme blog, Memebase.

Ash Pedreiro | Dat Ash

About Cheezburger:

Cheezburger, the company which publishes popular sites such as I Can Has Cheezburger?, FAIL Blog, Know Your Meme, Memebase, and The Daily What, is one of the largest online humor publishers in the world where millions of people come every month to get their 5-minutes of happiness. Cheezburger counts a passionate fan base of 19 million people who upload more than 500,000 pictures and videos as well as view 400 million pages and 110 million videos each month.