Have you heard about the totally dangerous and crazy new trend that is sweeping the UK? It's called "tombstoning," and it involves bored British youths hurling themselves off piers and rocks and cliffs into bodies of water dozens of feet below! Which we imagine bored British youths have been doing as long as piers and rocks and cliffs and bodies of water have been in existence, but it's getting to be summertime and newspapers need to manufacture fake trends to fill up column space. Anyway, it's evidently becoming such a problem that a lady whose son broke his neck jumping off a 30-foot-pier decided to make public a photo of the poor kid with tubes coming out of his mouth hooked up to a ventilator in a hospital. "If we can stop someone else from tombstoning by releasing this picture then it will be a bonus," she tells the Sun.

Tombstoning, which the Sun describes as a "craze," is certainly gaining in popularity of late (our favorite press mention, from the May 12 issue of the Irish News: "Drunk People 'Stupid' to Enter the Sea"), but it's not exactly new: a Nexis search produces 637 hits for "tombstoning," the earliest dating back to 1995. And wouldn't you know, the Guardian referred to it as a "new summer craze" back then, too!

The Guardian also offers an explanation as to why kids all of a sudden decided to climb things and then jump off of them, other than because that's what kids do: indoctrination by way of an extreme soda marketing campaign! A group of six teenagers who had to be rescued from a jagged rock outcrop seemingly told authorities that they decided to go tombstoning after watching this Pepsi Max ad featuring extreme grandmothers.

We imagine it's only a matter of time before Mountain Dew is blamed for this.