urbanbohemian

writer, streamer, content creator, brunch enthusiast 🥂

oops: Busted!

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It’s about as much of a secret that I used to love the show Mythbusters as it is that I think it’s now gotten stale and played out. At this point, it’s a wonder they haven’t done a “jump the shark” myth. So hearing about this little tidbit on this morning’s news was rather amusing. ‘Mythbusters’ cannonball hits Dublin home, minivan:

One of the zany experiments staged by the “Mythbusters” television show nearly turned into a suburban tragedy Tuesday afternoon in Dublin when the crew fired a homemade cannon toward huge containers of water at the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department bomb disposal range.

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.

…

Reached Tuesday evening, [co-host Adam] Savage said, “I can’t talk right now,” before hanging up.

I remember how momentarily freaked out I was by the recent earthquake until realizing what it was. I can’t imagine coming home to a large hole through my house or worse a cannonball having crashed through a car outside.

NowPublic has a picture of a re-tweeted, now deleted1 update from Grant Imahara saying, “Today we’re working with heavy artillery.” Both Imahara’s tweet and the official Mythbuster’s account re-tweet have been deleted. They also provide some important lessons from this incident.

  1. Deleting tweets doesn’t mean they’re gone. People retweet, take screenshots, etc.
  2. Corollary to #1: deleting tweets makes you look guilty.
  3. You can’t delete a hole left by a cannonball.

So far there’s a complete silence about the incident across all of the show and cast twitter accounts: Official MythBusters, Adam, Jamie, Grant, Kari and Tory have probably all been ordered to scrub any tweets or re-tweets2 regarding the shooting of that segment, unsurprisingly.

The news is already all over twitter, NPR, local news, etc. and it looks like Beyond Productions has made a statement, though it can only be found in some of the reported stories. Local twitter user Clay Goetz has a series of tweets and pictures about it:

And other tweets about the incident are equally curious, supportive and wondering if this really does mark a decline for the show. I don’t want to see this take the show down, but I wish they’d focus less on blowing things up and more on busting myths.3

Update: It appears that the ban on the cast comments and social media accounts is over as all of them posted to twitter at approximately the same time yesterday.

In looking at the messages, it seems like there may have been some guidelines imposed:

  • acknowledge the incident
  • apologize for the accident
  • express relief that no one was hurt

Again, I do enjoy the show, but I think they’d be better off spending less time trying to figure out how to get an explosion into every program. And at the least, use a bomb range for its intended purpose: testing and/or replicating explosive devices, practicing disarming procedures, and general safety, not firing projectiles. 🙄

1 I’m a poet and I didn’t even know it!

2 Not that all of their accounts are particularly “active”.

3 And I don’t mean “movie myths”. They’re supposed to be fantastical and a wee bit unbelievable, they’re in MOVIES.

† When could there ever have been a more appropriate time to use that cannon image of Adam and Jamie?

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