Well, well. Slashdot points us to this bizarre and slightly scary story about how everyone's favorite TV show, MythBusters, had an experiment that went really, really wrong yesterday. Apparently, it fired a home-made cannon at the Alameda County Sheriff's Department bomb disposal range. The idea was to shoot the cannonball into huge water containers.

But they missed.

Instead, the cannonball went hurtling through the suburban northern California town of Dublin, at 4:15, just as kids were getting home from school. According to the SF Chronicle report on this:

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.

Wow. Amazingly (and thankfully) no one got hurt in all of this. CBS has some astounding video of the carnage, including showing how the cannoball bounced around that house on Cassata Place putting holes in a bunch of places: But, perhaps equally interesting is that the Mythbusters themselves, appear to have done a little post accident tidying up. After hearing about the whole mess, Jon Laslow went and checked out the various Mythbusters' Twitter feeds and noticed that a bunch of photos of Kari, Grant and Tory posing next to cannons had been deleted. Oops. But, of course, you can't delete anything online... So, the photos & tweets have been preserved:
"Heavy Artillery"


"Canon Envy"


Tory and his Canon Like many folks around here, I'm a big fan of the show, but this seems like quite a mishap.