In the news: Bottle flipping

Bottle flipping becomes the rage with middle schoolers. (Boston Globe, 9/30/2016)

For those wondering how this started — or simply in search of a target for their ire — a good place to start would be Michael Senatore, an 18-year-old from Charlotte, N.C., who could be described as the Godfather of bottle-flipping. 

Last spring, finding himself without an act for his high school talent show, Senatore decided to try his hand at bottle-flipping, a hobby he and his classmates had dabbled in a year earlier. Armed with some dramatic music and a good amount of swagger, the teen strolled on stage and, with a flip of the wrist, landed a small, partly filled plastic bottle upright onto a nearby table. 

The brief performance, which sent those in the audience into hysterics, was captured on video, and you can guess what happened next: 5 million YouTube views, a trove of gushing blog posts, an appearance by Senatore on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”

Here's a bottle flipping video, posted just 10 days ago, with 6,963,256 views already.