Way back in 1976, a desperate Hollywood producer had the great idea of putting together a spectacular stunt involving Ken Carter, where he would attempt to jump a rocket powered Lincoln Continental over the St. Lawrence River in New York, attempting to land over one mile away, safely of course. During the first attempt, there appeared to be some mechanical failure, at which point it seems that Ken Carter realized he’d basically be committing suicide. After repeated attempts to get Carter to retry the stunt, the producers of the stunt secretly got Carter’s friend Ken Powers to take his place. Without Carter’s knowledge, the stunt began with Powers behind the wheel, shocking Carter who was on-site and reportedly enraged at the decision. Needless to say the stunt was a MAJOR success, Powers didn’t die, though he didn’t really make it far in the first place. A few years later, Powers *would* however die when making another attempt at this same stunt, when he landed upside-down and was crushed to death by the Pontiac Firebird’s roof.

Watch the uncomfortable carnage after the jump..

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I’m just, amazed. Shocked. Baffled. Kenneth Copeland and Kenneth Hagin are names that some know quite well. As firebrand Pentecostal ministers, they both were a little, unstable to say the least. As you can see in this video during a pastor’s conference, they both work the crowd into a fit of “holy laughter”, dancing, thrashing, falling around, mooing and speaking in tongues. It’s actually pretty uncomfortable to watch, considering half of the crowd are obviously only mooing because they don’t want to seem the odd one out. I don’t see how the Baby Jesus could like this one bit.

Watch a bunch of people rolling around the floor and acting weird after the jump..

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If fake, eh, if real, whoa, someone must have quite a good lawyer and have hopefully formed a pretty solid limited liability company structure around their business. The Shocking Battle Tanks game is exactly what it says, a set of 2 remote controlled toy tanks that fire upon each other and upon getting hit, sends a “painful” electronic shock to the person controlling the tank. Now we’re talking. The stated goal of the game is to knock the other tank out of commission and make the other player suffer as much as possible. My mouth, it is agape.

Read more: Shocking Battle Tanks

On a dark August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch reportedly mounted a still-camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a professional Formula 1 driver race the car at high-speed through the streets of Paris, France. No streets were closed as Lelouch had not obtained a permit for the shoot, as the footage reveals, the driver narrowly missed pedestrians, blasts through red lights and is documented driving the opposite way up one-way streets. Shortly after showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was immediately arrested, but refused to reveal the name of the driver. There are some disagreements with Lelouch’s story however, there are rumors that Lelouch himself was the driver, piloting his own Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 (a somewhat-rare performance-enhanced Mercedes sedan from 1978) in the film, with engine-audio from a Ferrari dubbed over. The driver was also reported to have reached 140 MPH during the film, which was later disputed by several independent groups who found that the driver never reaches more than 140 KM/H (85 MPH), but Lelouch’s claims could have easily been a translation error, in my opinion.

Regardless, watch the original film to digital transfer from 1978 after the jump..

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In the Spring of 2001, someone with much more patience than I have recreated Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” using only Lego, which then ended up hanging on the wall of their home. The project took months and an estimated 10,000 Lego bricks to complete, with the process being captured in pictures for all of the world to enjoy. Unfortunately, the Lego-hacker who created the piece seems to have moved on from his projects, with the last update of his site being in 2002.

Read more: Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” recreated with Lego | Mathematical Lego Sculptures | Henry Lim’s Lego art

Whew, we can all breath a major sigh of relief today knowing that on Capitol Hill, the cafeteria for the House of Representatives has gone back to calling fries French, rather than Freedom. In case anyone’s forgotten, 3 years ago, US citizens wasted their tax money on elected representives squabbling over changing the name of French Fries in their cafeteria to Freedom Fries as a way of striking back at France for not supporting the Iraq war. Well after many a sleepless nights by the French, those days are finally over, as Republican Reps now flip-flop away from Rep. Bob “Freedom Fries” Ney who was recently forced from the chairmanship in charge of House operations, has also called for the removal of US troops from Iraq. Naturally this is non-news now and should have been then, but seriously, freedom fries?

Read more: Fries French again on Capitol Hill

Chuck Shephard is the father of odd-news reporting, starting in the 1970s with his zine “View from the ledge”, Chuck has been collecting, reporting and syndicating odd news bites long before Fox News was ending their broadcasts with their feel-good puff pieces or stupid crook stories. Chuck’s column is currently published in over 250 daily and weekly newspapers throughout the U.S. and Canada. Posting weekly round-ups on his site and daily blasts via his blog, Chuck documents just about every odd or strange news snippet you could imagine, from dead cow carcasses mysteriously placed in trees to incompetent crooks to just plain weird tales of a detiriorating society. Chuck works from morning until night documenting judgment-challenged people committing weird news and is an inspiration to all of us here at Bunch of Nerds. One such example of Chuck’s work:

Ernest G. Johnson, 42, was arrested in Shreveport, La., in May after he, posing as an insurance company employee, roamed the corridors at LSU Hospital seeking to photograph women wearing casts. Said a police detective, “It’s like all he wants is to be in the presence of a woman with a cast on and have her attention.”

Read more: [News of the Weird | News of the Weird breaking reports]

I love reading about North Korea, it naturally sickens me to think of their human rights violations and other atrocities, but the fact that they are such an isolated nation with some pretty wonderous architecture leads me to search out any bit of information I can find coming out of the country. So to be able to witness their mis-information machine in motion is even more interesting. Enter the Korean Central News Agency, which is the state-run propaganda machine of the DPRK, founded in 1946 and the sole creator and distributor of ‘news’ within the DPRK. They transmit their news in several languages and appear to have ties to a foreign news agency in Japan who re-publishes their news on the internet for all of us to witness.

Some choice quotes and links to articles after the jump…

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