For the fourth consecutive year, Peugeot has challenged design students to express their artistic, automotive flair by throwing reality convention out the window in the cleverly-named Peugeot Design Challenge.

You can tell it’s a student design by the accompanying essay. If you thought marketing guff was bad, you’ve forgotten some of the things that students get away with writing…

DESIGN CONCEPT: The FUTURE, inspired by life emotions , mankind.
The man is pushing the limits of his own capacity from the beginings of mankind.

That’s some heavy stuff. Cool cars concepts, though.

Peugeot Design Challenge 2007 [via Jalopnik]

Andrei Karpov of Murmansk, as well as not being the world’s greatest gambler, is now a single man.

After staking his wife to buy back into a game of poker, not only did he lose the hand and the match, the enraged woman has now made good on the bet by falling for her estranged husband’s opponent.

When he lost the game and his opponent Sergey Brodov turned up to claim his winnings his wife Tatiana was so angry she decided to divorce her husband and started a relationship with Brodov.

Man loses wife at poker [Ananova]

It seems that there’s no such thing as a gimmick-free premium vodka release these days. Whether it’s an odd color, has a scorpion in the bottle or is the product of a mysterious diamond filtration process, there’s always this need for a point of difference other than, you know, being really good.

And so it is with New Zealand’s 26000. Made from water pumped from a 26,000 year old aquifer in NZ’s South Island, its makers proudly proclaim the water as having been trapped since the last ice age. Added to triple-distilled grain using techniques honed in Poland, it’s then bottled by hand (hygienic!) into handmade bottles. It’s simultaneously quaint and pretentious.

Take this sentence from their website…

We know that 26000 Vodka is going to lift premium vodka standards all over the world to a new level of purity. Over time it will then gain its rightful place upon the highest podium. Until that time, you are one of the blessed to know our little secret.

Well, we’re blessed to know that another contender is here to further saturate the world’s premium gimmick vodka range. Which well will they pump dry first?

26000 Vodka [via Scoop Independent News]