stunt

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This is already the most beautiful thing I’ve seen all week.  A Dodge Charger kitted out to look like the famous General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard goes roaring down the street in Somerset, Kentucky and jumps a ramp and goes soaring through the town’s water fountain.

Behold the stunt!

Okay, yeah the car got banged up a bit (the driver didn’t get a scratch apparently, thank the Lord) but that’ll buff right out.  Throw on some Bondo and a good sanding and it’ll be good as new!

Notice how this car is all-out faithful to the General Lee of the show.  Including the Confederate flat on the roof.  That’s a really good touch, completely in the spirit of the TV series.

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How perfectly fitting, that on the same day that Felix Baumgartner took his 24-mile high skydive, becoming the first person to break the sound barrier in freefall with only a high-tech suit for protection…

…retired Air Force Brigadier General Charles “Chuck” Yeager celebrated the 65th anniversary of the very first supersonic flight – which Yeager accomplished in the X-1 – by flying faster than sound again at the age of 89.

There ain’t enough accomplishments of daring these days, it sadly seems. Reading stuff like this, gives me great hope....

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Awright, I’ve been putting this off for too long now. I knew that this day would come. Not gonna run and hide anymore. Here, live or die, I will make my stand.

This afternoon I began the process of growing my can of Bhut jolokia.

And as I said when I first wrote about coming into possession of this stuff back in February, “This is either one of the bravest things that I will have ever attempted… or it is the stoopidest of my entire life…”

The Bhut jolokia: regarded by the scientific community as THE world’s hottest naturally-occurring pepper. Native to north-eastern India, in the local tongue “Bhut jolokia” translates into “ghost pepper”. Because as the natives like to joke, one bite of this could send you to an early grave.

Spicy heat is measured in Scoville units. Regular Tabasco sauce has a “hotness” of 2,500 Scoville ...

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This is either one of the bravest things that I will have ever attempted… or it is the stoopidest of my entire life (which could be snuffed out by this stuff).

Back in December I posted about my filmmaking partner “Weird” Ed Woody passing along the link where you can purchase Bhut jolokia for your very own! Why did Ed tell me about ThinkGeek’s Grow Your Own World’s Hottest DIY Pepper kit? Because he’s all too aware of my hideous interest in super-spicy hot food. Here’s the link if you want to buy some too: whether to consume or just to display on your desk as a potent symbol of power.

Well, as you can see in the photo on the left, I am now in possession of a can of Bhut jolokia seeds, along with the soil (presumably from north-eastern India where the pepper originates) to grow it ...

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This clip begins with that scene from Top Gun where Tom Cruise buzzes the control tower. And it then proceeds to assault your senses (and possibly good sense) with ten low-altitude flybys that Hollywood probably wouldn’t dare do without ‘spensive computer graphics. But these are real. And #3 on this list had me literally grabbing at my own head, it’s so scary! That dude on the ground has some brass ones…

Okay, #3 is maybe all the more amazing for me ‘cuz the pilot is flying upside-down. And I once saw a plane crash at an air show. It was in 1996 here in Rockingham County, and the dude in the cockpit was doing a low-altitude maneuver upside-down over the runway. It happened right in front of where we were sitting and it looked horrific. But he got out with just a few scratches and I heard that ...

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Being into knifemaking I’d read about this before: how back in the old days blacksmiths would have “anvil shootings”. There are conflicting stories about why the practice originated. Some say that it began when Union soldiers invading the South during the Civil War would try to destroy every anvil they found so as to break the Confederacy’s ability to make weapons and other tools. Others hold, with some evidence backing them up, that there was a much more mundane purpose behind anvil shooting: that blacksmiths simply found it the quickest way to “clean up” an anvil after long periods of use.

However it started, there’s no doubt that it was spectacular enough of a sight that for many years it became a favorite way to celebrate festive events throughout America, such as victory in war. But then with the increase of modern industry, anvil shooting began to decline.

And today, ...

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A man in Great Britain spent 84 nonstop hours watching EVERY episode of the television sitcom Friends.

Steve Misiura, 31, did it in an attempt to win a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. The current record is 72 hours.

Was it worth it?

He said he experienced nausea, stomach cramps and hallucinations while watching the adventures of Ross, Rachel and friends.

“I love ‘Friends,’ but this did indeed hurt. At around 72 hours I wanted to die,” Misiura said.

“I started hallucinating,” he said. “I was saying to my friend, ‘What’s happening to this room? The wall keeps disappearing.’

“I was also getting quite delirious and not knowing what I was doing, but it helped that every hour I was updating my photo log,” he said.

I want to see my sister try to do this 😛...

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