Once again, This is what all the fuss is over.
Personally, I find this whole hubbub funny as hell. How do you shut down an entire city? Simply put up a few lit brights.
People who should know better can’t tell the difference between a legitimate threat and an obvious marketing gimmick.
Oh man, do I feel safe!
Of course, back then all the criminals wore black and white striped shirts and had on those little black masks.
All right, we’re prepared for this. When Al Qaeda begins its “you can get it from a toilet seat” offensive we definitely can’t rely on Bostonians.
Jesus what a bunch of pussies.
For another thing, saving face in this instance isn’t just coming up with a scathing “well… yer mama!” comeback, peoples lives are gonna get ruined if Boston’s dipshit mayor gets his pound of flesh out of this. The only things that should be ruined here are the careers of the inept fucks shrieking for heads to roll.
My big question is whether the boards were lit up during the day, or not (I haven’t heard a definitive answer to that, and you sound like you aren’t completely sure either). If they aren’t lit during the day, and do, in fact, look just like packages of boards and wiring in hard-to-reach and vulnerable places… then I think the majority in this thread that is calling for the heads of the Boston establishment needs to calm the hell down, since ETF’s scenario is very plausible and understandable. If they ARE lit during the day (and it’s obviously seen in daylight from the distance that the boards would normally be viewed at)… well, there still needs to be a lot more blame placed on the people doing the advertising than there is in most of this thread, but in that case, there’s certainly a bunch of blame to be given out for overreaction by the city. The mere placement of the ads in some of those locations has to be on the shady side of legality, assuming (and one would either have to assume this or assume a level of incompetence on the part of the city government that would transcend anything that happened today) that city officials were not notified/asked permission/whatever is required of the locations.
I don’t really get some of the hate here… oh wait… <insert cliche about “This is the Pit!” here>.
Thanks muchly. Given that (un-lit in areas with sunlight, so not nearly so obvious as many would make it seem), and pending any permits by the marketing agency, I find it pretty hard to be mad at the Boston PD for reacting with extreme caution in the morning before the definitive info was available. And once the initial reaction was there, all of the local news quotes about how “the package was not dangerous and you should continue your normal activities” weren’t going to help that much.
Checking out the linked YouTube video shows that the places these signs were placed (in addition to the ones you have mentioned) all have one thing in common: they were dark areas. Hence, more visibility for the signs. Nobody is going to see a dinky little array of LEDs when it’s being drowned out by city lights that are a thousand times brighter.
They’re not. The previously linked photos on flickr show the light-sensing circuitry, which turns the lights off (probably to save batter power, since they’d be less visible during the day).
An arrest has been made:
Yeah, Turner’s boned.
If it doesn’t look like anything except some “device” until it’s lit up, and they don’t light up in the daytime, and they were illegally placed in odd places, then yeah, somebody should have known that someone somewhere would have reacted badly to the thing.
No, superficially, it looks like a Lite Brite.
Seriously, a bomb? Are you fucking kidding me? No bomb in the history of the world has looked like a lite brite, because, as mentioned before, the terrorists/mad bombers/whoever generally don’t want the bomb to call attention to itself. It generally just looks like a box.
Alright, not contacting the city and getting permission was stupid. The remarks by some of the officials involved are also stupid, and arguably prejudicial.
Here you go.
The bomb in Octopussy had a nice LED display too.
AS hired a PR firm to generate buzz about the new upcoming ATHF movie. It seems they did that and then some. You can’t put a price on getting people’s mothers familiar with the names Ignignokt and Err. They should have maybe put a “Watch ATHF on AS Sundays at 11:30” or something similar. They should be partially pitted.
The dumbass that called the cops thinking they might be actual bombs, even though they were cleary made to attract attention, needs to be pitted harshly. Sadly, being a moron is still legal.
The cops deserve at least a mild pitting for shutting down so much of the city for such a small item. Even if they were bombs, what good would shutting down the waterways do? They were placed in plain view. Was there some sort of large scale attack plan that could logically be assumed by finding these little light brites?
If I were a terrorist, I’d think this was hilarious. Americans freak out at advertising display that have wires and batteries on them, shouldn’t be too hard to “cry wolf” a few dozen times with harmless objects, and then plant the real device. Surely the government will not support constant full-scale anti-terror measures, there would be some sort of limit or protocol implemented.
It seems to me that this illustrates why terrorism is “working”. It’s starting to require us to strike a balance between abject paranoia, and complacency. Unfortunately, we can’t expect Joe six pack to act reasonably at all times, so we’re going to have plenty of people at both extremes of alertness.
Maybe we need to classify different areas into various levels of security concern. It could be something along the lines of “we’ll send a cruiser out to investigate the suspicious package at the Taco Bell, but if you abandon a vehicle outside the U.N. building…expect to be tackled violently by big burly security guys”.
Who knows? Apparently nobody does, seems that’s the point of terrorism, create an environment of unpredictable violence. I digress. All I know is, I’m keeping my eyes open for terrorist colorforms next.
I should also note that there is at least some value to the hilarity of the afternoon live-story-breaking-OMG don’t change the channel!- broadcasts as the origin of the packages came out: a bunch of 50-something news anchors, generally among the absolute best in the world at what they do (Boston local news is a pretty Big Thing, and they all dragged the First Teams into work early for this), getting these live updates about Cartoon Network and Adult Swim and Aqua Teen Hunger Force… and having NO CLUE as to what any of it is, and yet being in the position of having to explain the developing situation to their audience. So they all stumbled along quite awkwardly as the producers scrambled to find someone who was (a) in the studio, (b) alive and presentable for television, © knew what this “Adult Swim” thing actually meant, and (d) was able to speak the English language in a manner clear enough to be on TV. Happy Unintentional Comedy Time, and happy screen-time for a good few 20-something assistant producers.
Most of the local stations had enough of a clue to blur out the bird, though.
This reminds me of a case last April Fool’s Day in which some people put up golden blocks with question marks on the side similar to those seen in Super Mario games around a city somewhere. For some reason, the police believed them to be bombs. That case is pretty much what this case appears to be: ignorance on the sake of the authorities.
What I want to know is whether or not there was ever a case in which some artist put LED lights up in a city as part of a project that wasn’t an ad campaign. Artists sometimes put up images of Space Invaders, etc. on sides of buildings just for the heck of it. I wonder if this Aqua Teen Bomb Threat Force* is the first case of LED street art…and if not, did the police believe it to be a bomb then, too.
[sub]*Number one in the hood, G.[/sub]
Crazy Eddie lives…
There is already one for sale on ebay. Current bid over $500.
What this points to is the fact that the American public, myself included, isn’t very familiar with what a bomb looks like. I mean, is it the sticks of dynamite with the clock attached to it? The glob of white silly putty? To find fault with the person who reported it to the cops is pretty unfair.
Turner was pretty stupid to hire out the PR company… at least doing it with a paper trail. They’re a corporate citizen with big pockets. Clearly there wasn’t much oversight over how the PR company did their job. Seems a little odd for a corporation to open themselves up to such liability.
The artist guy they arrested is clearly the most convenient scapegoat. I feel bad for the guy. If he got caught putting the lite-brites up he would have probably been chased home by the cops. Now he’s in the pokey. And it’s not as if he called in the “bomb hoax.”
The Fox affiliate called it a hoax, which I thought was a little incorrect. It would be a hoax if people purposely called in and said there were bombs throughout the city. It just sounded like people called in to say they saw similar suspicious objects. I know someone suggested that the additional reports were calls from members of the street team. If that’s true, it’s at once brilliant marketing strategy and fucked up at the same time.
Mayor Menino and the police chief (new on the job) looked pretty stupid. The initial story out of City Hall was that they received a call at 5 pm from Turner explaining the marketing tactic. Later Menino said that they knew it was an AS ad from 3 pm. The reporter asked questions and it became obvious - Menino has no poker face and is looking to kick someone’s ass.
Quite by accident, AS and ATHF have received more publicity than they could ever hope for. Pretty amazing. The fact that this was quite accidental makes it all the more interesting. Of course, it raises the bar for all viral marketers and street teams.
You know what’s really weird to me? That as far as we know, nobody in the other cities called the cops about those LED boards. Not thinking they were bombs, but just asking what the hell they were. Maybe they weren’t attached to underpasses and highways in other cities?
Time to roll out the Gulfstream V.