That would make some sense, and considerably change my mental image of what happened! I was picturing some sort of pinball behaviour off a few buildings, which would have been awesome, but highly unlikely!
Fair enough. I was grouchy yesterday and probably just read too much into it. I think it was the rather specific statement "no one came to our door" that got to me. Maybe this is a neighbourhood where everyone actually knows each other and generally go door-to-door with major news and gossip, so that’s normal for her! Personally, I don’t even know my immediate neighbours!
I imagine Tory, Grant and Kari going through the house(s) with lots of "Whoa"s and "Hoooly Crap"s and "Look at what it did to this wall"s along with a lot of giggling. Then they’ll cut to Grant saying “Well, we got a lot of good data with this launch, we learned that a cannonball powered only by fingernail clippings and eyelashes can, in fact, be sent over 500 yards and through a house. Now we just have to crunch the numbers and see if it was possible for this to happen if the houses were built to 8th century Greek standards.”
Jamie: Ummm…can we edit that out?
I’m glad no one was hurt, especially because my first reaction to the headline was to laugh my butt off. I do find it interesting that no article I’ve seen so far mentions which team was working with the cannon. I wonder if there is any chance that none of the hosts were present at the time, and the crew was filming without them.
I wonder if there will be any fallout from this? The police may decide that it’s not worth letting Mythbusters use the bomb range anymore. I can’t imagine them ever being allowed to fire cannons at the bomb range anymore.
The shows dependance on blowing stuff up is getting pretty ridiculous. I prefer the episodes where they actually test ideas like building a boat from duct tape.
I remember one of the recent filler episodes (“We don’t have any myths to do this week so here’s our Top 10 Favorite Whatevers instead!”) Kari saying that one explosives experiment that they did blew out windows in the next town. She was pregnant then so the producers dragged her along because no one could POSSIBLY get mad at a pregnant woman.
They might be asking her to stick a basketball up her shirt and tag along again
I don’t know if the link is to the news story, but the local ABC news last night had an excellent picture of a cannonball sized hole in their wall. From what they said when they fired the cannon, which they have done many times before, it missed the water tank supposed to slow it down, smashed through the wall, bounced on the street, went through the house, went through a minivan, and landed in front of another house.
I think next they should fire a coyote shaped object and see if you get that kind of a hole.
The cop they interviewed is also an adviser to them, so I don’t think they are going to get into too much trouble. Someone, though is getting a new car and a new wall.
If I was the homeowner, one of my conditions for not suing them would be that I get to keep the cannonball, with a signed picture of the cast holding it. That plus something involving Kari.
There were stories of soldiers trying to stop bounding cannon balls with their feet-but the suckers contain so much inertia, even at 15 MPH, that the soldiers would break their legs (or arms) when they tried to stop them.
If the myth was “If you shoot a cannonball into someone’s house, you pay a lot of damages,” I suspect it’ll be confirmed. This may have been a crazy ricochet, but they’re very fortunate nobody got hurt. I hope this episode makes it to the air and that it doesn’t cause any major problems for them. (EDIT: The article says their insurance carrier will handle it, in which case I guess it won’t be a major problem for the show.)
The article I read mentioned that Grant sent a tweet that said, “Today we get to play with the heavy artillery!” that was subsequently deleted, so I’m guessing it was the second team.
Judging form what the articles said, it appears the cannonball was supposed to hit some water barrels. So apparently they were testing a myth about stopping a cannonball with water or something like that. But the cannon misfired and the cannonball missed the target and went off into the adjacent residential neighbourhood.
