Yes, you heard right – as mindless as it sounds, bottle flipping is the new craze taking over the lives of kids and adults – in the US anyway and it isn’t about to fade anytime soon.
Already YouTUbe is dominated by video upon video of everyday folk filming their flipping of a half-filled plastic water bottle by an artful flick of the wrist so it arches through the air and lands either upright on its base or upside down on its cap.
Oh, and don’t forget to infuse that wrist flick with a whole load of attitude!
The “culprit” behind igniting this craze is 18-year-old Michael Senatore, a North Carolina high school student who performed the bottle flip for his school’s talent show. Senatore even appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, who himself, while seeming to mock the stunt, was nonetheless impressed by it.
Parents meanwhile and some schools have not been too pleased with this new obsession.
CNN, in a report titled “The craze that’s driving parents crazy”, related how a mother of two young boys was so annoyed by the repetitive thud of the bottles on the floor that she banished her kids from the house. They were also prohibited from indulging in their hobby until homework was done.
Her kids however are addicted to it, finding the skill, once perfected “something really amazing.”
Some schools, lacking the tolerance for bottle flipping, have banned it outright while others have disallowed it in their classrooms, where flying bottles could potentially injure someone, the Portland Press Herald reported.
One school in Freeport however, embraced the craze, with its principal and teachers agreeing to hold a “water bottle event” cum fund raiser, the money of which was donated to charities.
Bottle flipping has become so huge an addiction that those who perform it have taken the simple table flip to new levels of creativity, the more challenging the better.
While one man has succeeded in flipping his half-filled bottle all the way atop a MacDonald’s signpost several metres above him, others have flipped bottles onto window ledges, or on tables behind their back as they knelt on the ground.
Either way, the adoration of spectators who cheer them on after a successful flip is doing wonders for the self-esteem of bottle flippers, who enjoy their five minutes of fame.
Cashing in on the craziness, multiple mobile apps that recreate the activity are available online for the truly desperate. One app in particular, designed by four university engineering students, called Bottle Flip 2k16, was downloaded three million times in the first month of its release, the London Free Press reported.
So doing nothing in particular this weekend? Why not perfect your bottle flipping?
Mike Senatore coaches Stephen in the fine art of the water bottle toss
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