HURL TRUTH
Meet the neknominators: amateur web gladiators whose weapons are booze, vomit, saliva and worse. By Lin Sampson
SO this Aussie guy with a face like a pie is talking on YouTube. “Ok cobbers, I just got home. Had a bit of bingle on the old scooter. Hell hot here, going to skull back a few bomber beers — that substance that has been helping white people dance since the 1600s. I am so hungry I could eat the arse end out of a low-flying duck.”
He takes a bottle out of the fridge and goes into celebrity chef mode.
“Ok so I take my beer, pour it into a cooking pot, sauté it with a mixture of toothpaste and shampoo, add a bit of onion. Stir slowly until it forms a frothy mix then add rum and vodka.
“Hey man, this is one hung froth. I like to decorate my koozeen with a topping of dog food, makes a delicious, crumbling brown topping. Final ingredient is spit. I like to use my own — brings out other flavours.”
He spits heartily into the beery soup and pours the lot into a tankard, chugs it down and then immediately projectile vomits, hurling across the kitchen, croaking out “Ok mates I niknominate Dale and me mate Rattler.”
His weird boozeblitz is part of a new and (some think) dangerous and corrupting trend sweeping the web called neknomination.
It is defined by the Urban Dictionary thus: “A neknominator has the honour (after posting a video of themselves sculling/chugging whatever alcoholic beverage they have available to them) of calling out or “#neknominating” in conjunction with a Facebook tag two others to sculling/chugging an alcoholic beverage (sic).”
This translates into English as: Take a video of yourself downing a beer or any other drink in one and then post it on YouTube and at the same time send out a challenge, a neknomination, to two other people to do better.
It is understood that this schoolboy prank, with its often unintended consequences, started at a private college in Western Australia, where a lot of unpleasant things start. One silly student uploaded a video of himself drinking a beer in one throw and called on two of his best mates to do the same. They did, and then invited all their friends.
“It’s not only the drinking,” says Tabitha Paton Lorentz, who has just come down from Rhodes University. “The challenge is to make it something different and more daring.” And she followed her own advice when she got some dubiouslooking strangers in a pub to spit in her glass before glugging it back. Spit is a popular ingredient for nekkers.
Over the past few weeks this whacko compulsion has gone viral as various vainglorious pranksters try to up the ante. A girl rode a horse through Tesco’s in the UK, shouting at cowering security guards: “You got 24 hours, don’t let me down.”
A guy from the London School of Economics vacuumed the main drag in his dressing gown, before holding up the traffic as he downed a pint nonchalantly hanging on to the bonnet of a car.
One guy poured a bottle of hard liquor into a toilet bowl and then got two friends to hold his legs up while he did a handstand over the toilet and slurped up the booze.
The most revolting case was a highly tattooed ginger in a bath who masturbated and then poured the results into a beer which he promptly guzzled. A girl tweeted: “What was the white stuff he drank?”
There was one scary bottleblonde mum of indeterminate age and very determined tan wearing a track suit and competing with kids to get down pints: “Right on Trevor, let’s get this down.”
Afterwards, as she sicked up, she said: “Ok you win, I’m feeling a bit crooked, mate.” She was about 75.
And our own brave countrymen are right here, Proudly South African and completely canned. A neknomination rated on YouTube as “really funny” was a guy who was photographed from the waist upwards chugging back a Castle on Camps Bay beach and as he wiped his lips a beautiful bimbo rose from his lap into the picture, wiping her lips. Get it?
It is mostly harmless — if fairly revolting fun (and I have to admit I am a sucker for student humour) — but a couple of kids have copped it: one passing out backwards on to a glass and cutting an artery and another jumping into a river and drowning.
At last count there were four deaths, apparently due to neknomination, and although the causes could not be established beyond doubt, peer pressure is intense. Nothing like being offered a dare plus the chance of downing a few beers and doing something unsuitable on YouTube to win dubious fame.
All over the digital universe, young glowfaces are knocking themselves out to be drunker, madder and more outrageous.
One thing one might take into account is that one day, when you are fully qualified as a super special lawyer defending a drunk driver, someone might just come up with a video of you wearing a fur bikini and vomiting on the bonnet of your car.
Remember: what is on the internet never comes off it.
Some joiners in South Africa, in a rather sentimental countermove, became worthy neknominators with pleased-with-themselves smiles. They deliver food and goodies to various charities, shouting to bewildered wrinklies and vacant-looking people in wheelchairs: “We have been neknominated,” before showering them with gifts. The offerings included an out-of-date copy of Fairlady (it is heartening to think that a magazine with this lovely name still exists in our town), a box of Kleenex and a cake from Charley’s Bakery.
Somehow this was not quite what neknominators had in mind. But each to his own.