As part of their continuing efforts to make people pay attention to science by peppering it with explosions, the crew of Discovery Channel’s Mythbusters blasted a Dublin, California home with a cannonball yesterday, an accidental outcome that was nevertheless much more instructive than its intended result. The incident occurred when the team fired a homemade cannon on the grounds of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department bomb disposal range, aiming for huge containers of water in a scientific experiment designed to prove that cannons busting up big-ass containers of water is totally awesome.
Unfortunately, they missed, sending the 6-inch projectile right through a cinder-block wall and over a nearby hillside, where it ended up in a suburban neighborhood some 700 feet away, burst through a house’s front door, exited through the second story (leaving a “cantaloupe-sized hole”), bounced across the street, and then smashed in the window and dashboard of a minivan. Fortunately for everyone involved—and especially the liable producers and hosts of Mythbusters—no one was hurt, with the residents of the house not even noticing the damage until the plaster dust began settling on them as they were all asleep, because in Dublin, California, people just sleep the day away at 4:15 p.m., apparently. Instead, Mythbusters managed to demonstrate conclusively the longstanding theory that cannonballs will seriously fuck up your house and minivan, so don’t fire cannonballs at those things.