I looked at the chunks of watermelon to see if they made the obvious mistake there, but the pieces fly towards the shooter as they ought to (against what most people would expect). Mr. Wong knows his physics.
Why does that happen, anyway? I would expect most of the shrapnel to go along with the path of the bullet, but this video shows that a .50 caliber round + watermelon does in fact cause crap to go in every direction pretty much equally: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoW8nHIVuRk
Being that it's most definitely fake, it makes a good case that they aren't idiots at all. In fact, Freddie Wong and his cohorts are really pretty talented little goofballs in regards to their homegrown special effects bonanzas.
If it IS real, these guys are crazy and stupid, though they would be just as crazy and stupid for doing this with ANY rifle.
Well, a .22 to the head would likely leave you tarded, a .50 cal to the head would likely leave you dead.
Also, most .22 rifles are not very precise at any kind of distance.
I think picking the .50 cal would increase my chances of it ending the William Tell way and not the William Burroughs way.
I appreciate that they threw the giant "don't try this yourself" banner but I'm going to give it about 2 weeks before we hear about the first casualty of copycats (in a bike helmet of course).
This one gets repeated so often that the Discovery channel has a sticky thread for it in their forums. The easy counterargument is that if you shoot a .50 through a paper target it leaves a bullet-sized hole without otherwise disrupting the paper.
Mythbusters did an episode last year about sonic booms which included firing a .50 BMG to pass within an inch or two of various objects such as light bulbs and panes of glass. As I recall, the only time an object so much as wiggled was when one of the shots veered slightly off course and actually hit it.