Saturday, February 03, 2007

Boston Follies-- a Guest Blogger

Yesterday, among the topics my son and I talked about on our way to our traditional every-other-Friday Chinese buffet was the escapades of the Boston police, who collared two young slackers whose crime seems to have been to put up some blinking-LED advertisements for a Cartoon Network show. I'd only glanced at the news stories about it. My son pointed out that the ads had been up for two weeks!. Way to stay on it guys! What crime did they commit? Felony "putting up of silly electronic devices."

My old friend Ron, one of the funniest and smartest people I know (and whom I'm trying to convince to start blogging) sent me a great email about it, which I present to you with his blessing.


Have you seen this?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6319211.stm?ls

Cartoon Network should sue Boston for being a pack of dumbasses and property damage.

Can you believe they arrested two guys for "placing hoax devices"? These aren't "hoax devices", they're "exactly what they seem to be devices." If they placed a device that purported to be a bomb, and was not, in actual fact, a bomb, then you would have a hoax. This is an a device that purports to be an ATHF ad, and is, in actual fact, an ATHF ad.

In all of their experience dealing with explosive devices, I wonder how many the Boston Bomb Squad have come across that have a brightly lit Mooninite flipping them the bird? None? Does that sound about right?

Even if you want to stretch the definition of hoax device (in much the same way that you might define a piece of toast as a grilled cheese sandwich because a brain damaged chimpanzee could conceivably confuse the two) the rest of the law says that the hoax device has to be placed with the "intent to panic the public", not the "intent to get the public to watch a movie based on a cartoon on late night cable television".

I blame Fox News.

No way should Turner roll over on this. Boston arrested the two guys who were hired by the ad company to put the signs up and they want Cartoon Network to shell out over a million dollars that the city claims they spent in one afternoon. Turner should turn this into a media circus and hand them their collective asses. If that silly bitch Martha Coakley has a political career after this, someone is not doing their job.

Wikipedia has an entry with some good quotes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_magnetic_light_scare

My favorite: "The majority of us recognize the difference between a bomb and a Lite-Brite,"

No shit.

10 comments:

JR's Thumbprints said...

Somebody's Lite-Brite upstairs ain't workin' too well. I found this hilarious.

Danny Tagalog said...

Improvised explosion devices!!!!

V. good!

Toccata said...

When I first read about the story on the internet, the day they found several "bomb like" devices around Boston, there was no accompanying picture. Then I saw the interview with the two slackers and thought, "You guys are nuts! Don't you realize you are in a whole load of trouble?" Still no picture. When I saw the lite-bright cartoons I thought the news had somehow mixed up two different stories.

Katie Schwartz said...

that is hysterical. jr, totally conjured lite-brite for me too!!!

oy, people, yensky. too much...

SamuraiFrog said...

That's absolutely hysterical. Hey, at least Boston is safe from the terror of Cartoon Network promotions. Maybe they can finally end the scourge of bus ads next.

Barbara Bruederlin said...

Well said indeed. I've always found lite-brite to be vaguely disturbing. but never enough to spend a million dollars to get rid of it.

Mob said...

Considering the seemingly epic proportions of the promotional disaster, I wonder how the film will do in Boston when it opens?

Will they feel obligated to see the film out of some sense of making things right? Will the mayor declare a holiday so people will be free to check out a matinee?

Johnny Yen said...

When I first heard the news story I was sympathetic-- we are living in a dangerous world these days. Then I saw the pictures and found they'd been there for two weeks, and lost all sympathy.

And why did these two poor schmucks get arrested, and not the people who paid them to do this? Better they be putting up silly advertising than rubber-banding ads for sewer repair and home siding onto my door.

I just saw that Turner is going to pay the Boston bomb squad $2 million for it all. This was a bargain for Turner-- he got way more than that $2 million worth of free advertising from it all.

Foofa said...

This was hilarious. Since when was Lite-Brite scary?

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