Yesterday Mythbusters shot a cannonball into someone's home, and no they weren't trying to bust the myth of "shooting a cannonball into someone's home." So how exactly does this affect the "do not try this at home" warnings at the beginning of each episode? And sure, cue the inevitable jokes about myth-busting Murphy's Law. But about that cannonball and about those homes--the Discovery Channel staple, known for testing out the ridiculous ways you could get electrocuted (lightning, electric eel, etc.) or figuring out how to make a homemade death ray, was attempting to shoot a home-made cannonball through barrels of water and a cinder-block wall, at the safe-sounding Alameda County Sheriff's bomb disposal range in California, reports KTVU and the San Francisco Chronicle. The lesson in inertia then apparently took a turn for the worse, when the cannonball careened down a hillside into the town of Dublin. The Chronicle explains:
The cantaloupe-sized cannonball missed the water, tore through a cinder-block wall, skipped off a hillside and flew some 700 yards east, right into the Tassajara Creek neighborhood, where children were returning home from school at 4:15 p.m., authorities said.There, the 6-inch projectile bounced in front of a home on quiet Cassata Place, ripped through the front door, raced up the stairs and blasted through a bedroom, where a man, woman and child slept through it all - only awakening because of plaster dust.The ball wasn't done bouncing.It exited the house, leaving a perfectly round hole in the stucco, crossed six-lane Tassajara Road, took out several tiles from the roof of a home on Bellevue Circle and finally slammed into the Gill family's beige Toyota Sienna minivan in a driveway on Springvale Drive. end quote
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