Maybe I should plan on steering clear of the place—they do seem a little trigger-happy. The must-reads of the day are Bruce Schneier and Teresa Nielsen Hayden on the ridiculous over-reaction of the mayor and police in Boston to a trivial (if obnoxious) ad campaign.
You and your pitiful three dimensions!
The terrorists are coming, the terrorists are coming!
Dunkin’ Donuts must have lost a lot of police business that day.
The guys they arrested should sue the city for false arrest after the case is (inevitably) thrown out of court. I’ll bet the ACLU would be happy to represent them in such a suit.
george:
Dunks has lots of police business every day. I once saw a cop turn on his lights to run a red light and pull right into the Dunks on the corner.
Yeah, if anyone should be charged for “inciting fear”, it should be the media and the police. No one would have been so fearful if they hadn’t approached this children’s toy in bomb squad full body armor, treating it like a bomb without bothering to investigate the matter more fully.
I wrote about this on my site today, and I agree with the links posted in your entry, Pharyngula. FDR’s famous saying that we have nothing to fear but fear itself is more applicable in today’s fear-mongering world than in was in his own time!
I’m just upset that that Mayor Mumbles won’t be thrown out of office for ‘dipshittery unbecoming an elected official of Boston’.
Hear hear!
I might even understand approaching one of the object for the first time with a measure of trepidation–although why someone would choose a strange, threatening-looking object to use as a disguise for a bomb is a question I might expect to occur to someone in law enforcement–but this same, strange ritual was re-enacted again and again in city after city, carefully documented by television crews from all the major networks.
Don’t these people talk to each other? If security and law enforcement officials aren’t sharing information about objects that turn out to be benign, how much better are they going to do with objects that turn out to be deadly?
Personally, I’m blaming
this on George Bush.
blaming this
What I want to know is how those guerrilla marketing guys managed to panic the Boston police. Did they hire some people to call in alarms? Did they anonymously post email onto a watched bulletin board, under the name of some made-up terrorist group, pointing to their devices?
Come on, guys. If the panic was ridiculous, so is the notion that this isn’t exactly what guerrilla marketers hope to achieve. These guys will be gurus in their field. Turner has agreed to pay a million dollars? How else would they get so much publicity for so little money?
I got photos of the light-brites on my blog: http://dererumnatura.us/archives/2007/01/mooninites_inva.html I want to make one and put it on my wall.
I don’t think the street cops were panicked – one of the suburban papers had an account of them putting a device into a highly secure and blast-proof brown paper bag, but overtime is overtime and the Christmas bills are due.
Steve: there is a valid charge for illegal postering – usually punished by a few bucks costs and continued without a finding for 6 months.
This site has a promotional photo from ABC’s dramatic retelling of events…
There’s also a video on YouTube showing the creators of the “devices” responding to questions. They treat the situation with all the seriousness and decorum it deserves.
Never forget.
The mayor is being an idiot as is the attorney general if she doesn’t drop the charges. However I should point out that many of the quotes being circulated were from earlier in the day when the media was still reporting they were fake bombs. Those who continue to be outraged once they learned they were light bright ads however deserve all your contempt and more.
The local news here in Boston is reporting that the artists were asked by the advertising agency to refrain from informing the police and media that the devices were part of a marketing campaign. This failure to notify strikes me as more than a little irresponsible.
The best comment I came across on the whole thing was from a more or less anonymous poster going by the name of “Grombar”:
The bloviation continues, too — rather than admit to overreacting, all the officials involved keep raising the spectre of “nahn-elevin”, as though repeating it ad nauseam will make the rest of the world suddenly sit up and say, “Oh, yeah — I guess I can see how electronic signs, left for weeks at random places in your city, might look like IEDs after all.”
Jeez.
Just because they are guerilla marketers doesn’t mean they wanted to create panic or get attention from a “hoax”
The light signs were put up in cities all over the country… only did the Police in boston react to it as a threat.
It’s not hard to imagine some scared old lady seeing the sign not understanding it and freaking out. The marketers didn’t call the police. And no one called in a bomb threat.
I heard the rumblings about this, but didn’t bother to read the hubbub until today. Cartoon Network should rake in plenty of people over this one, most of them living in Boston. You’d have to live under a rock to at least have never heard of ATHF before. Heck I haven’t seen the show in years and I knew what the Mooninites were.
The police here in Philadelphia freaked out about it too.
There was a “terrorist” “radiation” alert in our county recently when someone found a “radiation source” that was glowing GREEN!! Turned out to be a discarded chemical light stick but it sure got folks antsy.
As ubiquitous as ATHF must seem for those of us who watch Adult Swim, it’s terrifying but true that tons of old people have never heard of nor watched Robot Chicken, ATHF, or Futurama.
They know not what they’re missing, the decrepit old fools.
Man, I was sick and tired of the Mooninites before they were cool.
Adult swim apology
ATHF scene
He comes my laser… wait for it.
http://onegoodmovemedia.org/movies/0702/ds020107exclusive.mov
This just in!!!!
The people who came up with this ad campaign were clearly as dumb as rocks, but if the “devices” really did bear light-up images of cartoon characters flipping the bird, shouldn’t someone have figured this out and given Cartoon Network a rather curt phone call? I mean, I’m 50, I have no kids, I haven’t subscribed to cable in two years, and I still recognize at least some of the minor characters from Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Isn’t anyone on the Boston police force either under 35 or a resident of a household that includes college-age cable watchers?
I can understand why the devices spooked people, and wouldn’t have too much sympathy for Cartoon Network if the city of Boston filed a lawsuit against them to recover the damages. However, I don’t understand for two seconds why this should now be in the hands of the criminal justice system.
The statement from the prosecutor about how dangerous it would have been if the devices had actually contained explosives shows how truly idiotic their behavior is.
Yeah, and if every car parked on the streets of Boston had explosives in their trunks, just imagine what would happen if they exploded!!!
What morons.
Julie:Isn’t anyone on the Boston police force either under 35 or a resident of a household that includes college-age cable watchers?
I’m sorry, that’s not a hair question.
I mean obviously… if you were going to plant bombs all over a city you would LIGHT THEM UP so they’re incredibly easy to find.
Terrorists never hide their bombs. Duh.
Perhaps what is more important than the fact that the cops were stupid enough to think these very obtrusive signs were bombs is the fact that 45 of them were placed all over the city, and not a single cop caught or stopped the person(s) placing them despite their ‘suspiciousness’- point being, HAD they been explosives, Boston would already be quite BLOWED UP.
Maybe they’ll just fall down the stairs, hit themselves in the head with their own nightstick on the way down, and forget all about it.
And here’s something else that just doesn’t make sense. If you’re going to build bombs and put them in public places:
1) Why would you go to all the trouble to create something as complicated as those signs?
2) Why would you make them all look alike so they’d be easy to identify?
3) Why would you make your bomb stand out so that it would attract attention?
How many IEDs do you suppose have followed this model in Iraq? My guess would be zero.
It truly amazes me how many people are ready to piss all over themselves at the first car backfire thanks to the Bush administration’s fearmongering.
Well, I just came up from my bunker, and I have come to the conclusion that there was fault on all sides. I think the media went bonkers because we didn’t get an honest-to-goodness new color alert when the last elections rolled around so it’s been slow at the terrorism desk.
As for the two who put up the signs, maybe they could have let someone know that they were doing it and that the city would probably get some calls.
As for the cops, well, at least they got some practice.
Now, I want to know about this: Call the bomb-squad! It’s an umbrella stand!
Ken@26:
It is now my life’s work* to make this the standard intertubes response to idiotic questions from the Media Conglomerate.
*well, for as long as it keeps my attention, anyways.
Jeff Alexander @3:38 —
Or it would be, if it were true. Color me skeptical. If anybody has a reason to try to pin this whole debacle on the ad agency, it would be the local news in Boston.
I gotta say… If terrorists were stupid enough to make bombs that obvious we’d have nothing to fear at all. I mean I could understand if someone were to complian about the signs violating public decency standards, but this? I hope whoever called it in doesn’t live near an airport, or else they must live in absolute terror of all the UFO’s that fly overhead every night.
Shrub (in honor or Molly Ivins) is undoubtedly ecstatic over this. It demonstrates that he’s got the police forces in fear mode, jumping at the first “sign” of terroristic [sic] activity. Like all demogogues he needs to rule through fear and the positive constributions of the Boston police to demonstrating that behavior must indicate he’s doing something right.
My take is like Julie’s, but from the opposite end. Aren’t there any rational, thinking adults in the government of the City of Boston?? The cartoon promoters, who are adolescent jerks, made absolute fools of the city fathers in fair Boston. Let’s be happy they didn’t do it to Shrub, becuase he’d have called out the bombers, missles, tanks, and fighter jets, all the better the scare the citizenry with.
The bottom line? Boston really wants the Mothmonsterman or Brownie Monster light-up ads. They’re just too stupid to just ask, instead playing Travis of the Cosmos all over our rights.
That was exactly my thought too, particularly based on the other stuff which apparently contributed to the panic: there were reports of “pipe bomb-like devices”, which is to say, pipes. Presumably therefore every parked car is a “car bomb-like device”.
The Subway Song
by Tom Lehrer
H is for my alma mater Harvard,
C is Central, next stop on the line,
K is for the cozy Kendall station, and
C is Charles that overlooks the brine…
P is Park St, busy Boston center! And
W is Washington, you see.
Put them all together, they spell…
HCKC…PW!!
Which is just about what Boston means to me.
The funniest thing I saw was that they were blurring out the finger of the mooninite on the news…
Steve_C:
No, it means they’re trying to get the most attention for the buck.
They only needed that reaction in one city, to get national attention. They had to put the signs up in multiple cities, so their ploy had plausible deniability. These two will be heroes in their field for years to come. Mere accident? Maybe. And either way, they will leave us wondering. ;-)
The blurring out of the finger was great. I really liked when some of the media pixelated the finger, and the end result was that it only made it larger and more pronounced.
Eventually, though, they caught on and blurred it old-school.
It’s two lights on a light bright! so funny…
People get offended by a light bright cartoon?
Do you know what I learned from all this? I had forgotten this fact but now I’ll NEVER forget.
Atta boarded at Boston’s Logan Airport.
Boston: sucky band, sucky baseball team, sucky ivy-league shit, and sucky security.
“As for the two who put up the signs, maybe they could have let someone know that they were doing it and that the city would probably get some calls.”
Probably they figured it would be miles of red tape if it were done through official channels.
I just hope they were promoting the movie and not the show because that last season sucked hard.
Ghod help us when the groundhog shows up today – secretive, underground creature with big teeth; time to call in the National Guard…
Margaret Atwood, a well know Canadian author, wrote an open letter to Americans a few years back.
There was this line in it I’ll never forget.
when did you get so scared? You didn’t used to be easily frightened.
Here is the letter in it’s entirety, if you care to read it.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20030328/COATWOOD/
Hmmm, the link didn’t work so well. They give you a teaser and want you to pay for the rest. Oh well. If you type in the proper search terms, you can read the whole thing on Google
A commenter at Alternet came up with the best framing of the event:
Boston Pee Party
With all the publicity this event got, that phrase will be very handy every time Cheney jumps out and tries to scare the nation.
Sigh…et tu PZ?
Here are some facts from the Boston Globe and elsewhere:
1) Not all of the signs were sitting around unnoticed for weeks. The guys that were arrested said they put a second set of 20 signs up Monday night into Tuesday morning (Jan. 29-30).
2) The police reported that in broad daylight they could not see the LED display. Not that most of them would have recognized a Mooninite anway.
3) There was a pipe bomb scare in the same area on the same afternoon as the ATHF fiasco unfolded [Boston Herald article]
I’ll admit it, I don’t know a lot about what bombs look like or what components go into making one. While it’s possible that Boston police could benefit from additional training to recognize and deal with bombs, hoax devices, and pop culture, I’d say that *most* of us here and elsewhere on the ‘nets know a lot less than they do about the first two. So if the police had reason to think that there might be bombs then I am very glad that they shut down the subway system and the bridge that I drive over several times a week to get to work. I sincerely believe that they did so in an effort to protect the public, not to incite fear, and I am upset and insulted that so many in the blogosphere are using this as an excuse to rant and get attention while portraying Boston police and the entire city as paranoid and stupid.
What happened later on with the arrests and the censoring of cartoon characters with middle fingers and the bigwigs coming out of the cracks to speak to the press…whatever. Show me any city in the US where that doesn’t happen.
The Boston city guvmit pissed on itself big time for this one. They deserve a mocking for their paranoid fear-mongering.
I’m just upset that that Mayor Mumbles won’t be thrown out of office for ‘dipshittery unbecoming an elected official of Boston’.
Just throw him out when election time rolls around through a grassroots write-in campaign for Ignignokt.