The surprise isn’t that this happened. The surprise is that it hasn’t happened before, like a hundred times before. In an experiment gone awry, the MythBusters appear to have shot a cannonball through a house near the gun range where they normally test their artillery myths.

Apparently, the cannonball took some weird bounces, and went through two walls of a nearby house. Having once lived near a rifle range, I can tell you, the owners never thought anything like this could happen.

It does, however, make you wonder what happened to Jamie’s perfect period cannonball from the tree cannon myth.

I actually think the 48 Hours 2 myth was busted. The reason- pouring liquid nitrogen on a bomb doesn’t give you 2-3 seconds to get safe, it gives minutes- 15 in this case, but I’m sure that varies by how much liquid nitrogen is used. Danny & Mel could have walked out of the house with that much time. As for the cast iron tub being an effective bomb shelter- not surprised.

As for planes, it’s more fuel efficient to fly one big plane flying than 5 little ones, so I don’t think formation flying is the future of aviation.

I was aware of the math behind the Monty Hall paradox when it came to switching, but I hadn’t been aware of the psychological tendency to stick instead of switch. I found that interesting. I also noticed that Adam won a lot more than 2/3 of the time with switching and that Jaime won a lot less than 1/3.

In the gun holding myth, target shooting is one thing, but in a gunfight, no one’s accurate, not the military, not the police. I don’t know that how the gun is held matters when no one is actually trying to aim.

Second MythBusters retrospective in a row, though it looks like next week will be fan requests. Tonight was water myths, and this episode highlighted my biggest problem with the retrospective shows- no real information about the myths themselves.

The hubby did not remember the steam powered machine gun (I did), but at least they gave the outcome of that myth- busted. I did not remember the octopus egg hatching in a human stomach myth (hubby does), and they did not tell us the outcome of that myth, just talked about how cool it was to play with the octopus. Frustrating!

Modern explosives are stable- especially ones carried by the military- you know where they have to possibly carry them through a warzone in a pack on a soldier’s back? Yeah, the military is not using anything that blows up on impact. I don’t know that I’d want to cook with it, though, even if you can.

LOVED the throwing guillotines, though I really thought Grant might end up losing a finger. I was glad Tory’s simple design was the one that worked best because it actually seemed like something that could have existed in the era the myth was from.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a MythBusters where everything was plausible or confirmed. Even with that, here are the lessons I took away from the episode:

Guys who operate excavators are crazy. Actually, I’ve met a number of heavy machine operators, and I think crazy might be a good adjective for all of them. They say don’t try this at home, but they only got these “myths” because the excavator guys already had.

I would rather take a ride in the duct tape sailboat than in the duct tape plane. I can swim, but I can’t fly.

People naturally walk in circles, who knew? Apparently lots of people since that was the actual myth Adam and Jamie were testing. I did wonder why they used the earphones, blocking out additional sensory information. This wasn’t a myth about people who couldn’t see and hear walking in circles, just about people who couldn’t see. I think it would’ve been a truer test without blocking hearing.

Watching a truck go flying at 300mph toward a parked car in slow motion is cool. But no explosion. Apparently, there’s a reason special effects people choose to work with this stuff- it’s safe.