Department of Oops

“It wasn’t clear that it was a cannonball landing on the roof.”

No, I suppose not, not from indoors. A large, exhausted, bird, maybe. Or some of that blue ice which falls from passing, if you'll excuse the expression, airliners. But a cannonball? No.

Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage are hosts of the scientific experimentation show [“Mythbusters”].... The pair was reportedly trying to figure out how fast a cannonball would travel, when it misfired and shot hundreds of feet in the air.

I suppose a few calculations on a piece of paper wouldn't have been as photogenic.

It flew straight though the front door of a home on Cassata Place (in Dublin, CA), and bounced around like a pinball, flying up to the second floor before blasting through a back bedroom wall.

The wayward cannonball then blasted across a busy road and through a second home some 50 yards away, demolishing roof tiles.

I blame shoddy residential construction. And hard surfaces, of course. Back in the old days, cannonballs were expected to ricochet off of hard ground, banging up extra people. Hence the problems with shooting in the rain: fewer ricochets. And your cannon sank into the mud, making it harder to ready for the next shot.

The out of control cannonball finally came to a stop inside Jasper Gill’s minivan.

“It hit the dash, through the passenger window,” said Gill, who had gotten out of the vehicle just 10 minutes before the ball struck.

When life serves you lemons...With a short chain and some SuperGlue (TM) Jasper could have a new dangly thing for his rear view mirror. Sort of like graduation tassels. The video at the link below says it was about the size of a soft ball, which is around 3 1/2 inches. That's about the size of a 6 pounder. The rear view mirror should handle that.

In any case, no one was hurt and several people now have great stories to liven up their cocktail conversations. "Why, that reminds me of the time a cannonball sailed in through our front door, the stairwell wall, our bedroom wall, and out the other bedroom wall just as we were..." Yep: MythBusters should charge them for the privilege of putting their shoddy houses in the way.

There's a neat video at the CBS story.