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Such is life nowadays, in the times we live in according to someone I would rather not name. However, if you buy me a beer or a coffee, I do have a story.

That sounds ominous, Zack. You haven’t been in Boston recently, have you?

Boston HAS a bomb squad, right? How badly are these guys trained if they can’t tell an LED display and an incendiary device apart? They found the first one Wednesday morning and then shut the whole city down until Wednesday evening. Don’t you think if they had taken five minutes to look closely, they could have avoided spending a small fortune and inciting a media frenzy? Or, was it a convenient excuse for political posturing that caused their momentary blindness and stupidity?

Comment by Eric · “Or, was it a convenient excuse for political posturing that caused their momentary blindness and stupidity?”

Political posturing? In Boston? What’s the world coming to?
(okay, just kidding. I used to live there)

This is an important conversation to have. Thousands of Atlantans are terrorized by LED’s every day, and nobody does anything about it.

One of the most blood-chilling is 25 feet tall, right over GA 400:
Williams St-North Ave: 25+ MIN

Will no-one protect us from these infernal diodes?!

“25+ MIN”? You’ve been gone a while. That’s not so scary.

I sense a whole lot of defensiveness from Boston authorities, since it has come out these “devices” had been in place two to three weeks before they became such an imminent threat yesterday. It reminds me of the bogus EBS test we ran (once, because we got in trouble) ... “This is only a test. If this had been an actual emergency, you’d be dead by now.”

And then there’s the two goofball’s who had a press conference about their hair today. Looked to me like all they were capable of blowing up was their chances for future elective office or civil service employment. And I want to see a prosecutor try to convince a judge and jury that the “thing” pictured above was a “hoax device,” meaning, constructed to make people think it was a bomb. You can’t even convince me it was a hoax marketing device.

If I had seen it, I probably would have thought that GDOT-built sign emcee fleshy mentioned had dropped a chunk.

Up to about a year ago, 25+ was as high as it went.

That could have meant anything from 30 min to 1:45

The hoax was perpetrated by the person who phoned in the false alarm. The hoax was abetted by the first responders who reacted to their own sense of embarrassment by pretending that they thought the signs were bombs and blowing up three successive signs. It’s sort of like when one cop shoots an unarmed subject and then the rest of the cops join in and they all end up emptying their clips shooting the guy down. Or like when a war goes horribly wrong and the response is to send in more assets.

The more embarrassed the authorities get, the more they proceed to further their embarrassment. It’s not good enough to waste taxpayer dollars on a goof, they’re going to add legal expenses to the taxpayer’s bill. I think the Mass. Gov and the Boston Mayor are going to be the ones ultimately taking responsibility for all this by being turned out of office.

I think what’s being forgotten by many people is that 90% of America hasn’t a clue what an ‘LED throwie’ is, and doesn’t have the faintest idea who Meatwad and Err are.

I really can’t fault folks in the northeast for being jittery when they see an object that is weird, in a strange place it’s clearly not intended to be, complete with a crude tape-wrapped bulge at the bottom. If I can fault anyone, it’s the media for making it so huge so fast, probably with more of the same ‘say anything to fill the airwaves’ completely wrong early info that you mentioned not long ago.

The two doofs they arrested probably don’t deserve to be put in jail for terrorism, because clearly they had no intent to cause panic. However, their (yes, amusing) obviously rehearsed ‘hair questions only’ routine isn’t going to help them when the prosecutor starts talking to a jury about how they don’t care that they frightened people.

Yes, the general population isn’t that brilliant. But is it clever to do something like this without keeping that fact in mind? I’d say no- it’s pretty damn stupid to put odd devices around towns, and not expect the Great Unwashed to misunderstand. Look at your picture again- do you expect the average Joe on the street to know what that thing is, and to know that the lump at the bottom isn’t a pack of C4 like they’ve seen in how many (yes fictional, but remember your audience) movies and TV shows? It’s a real idiot of a ‘performance artist’ that doesn’t know his audience.

All it would have taken would have been a decent-sized sticker on the battery pack saying ‘Aqua Teen Hunger Force- Adult Swim, 10PM on TBS!’ and this would never have happened.

There’s no doubt, the specifics of this situation offer plenty for hindsight. In more than one place. I’d start with the whole marketing concept, but then I’m not in their target audience. I just don’t see how distributing 38 LED’s throwies about 1 × 1.5 feet in size in a city of millions is going to do much in the way of effective promotion. I mean, if someone saw it, and knew what it was, that’s not someone you need to reach with your promotion, is it? Those who didn’t know what it was were given no way to find out more … a cardinal sin of marketing.

So it was bad advertising before it became a bad imitation of terrorism. Before there was a bad reaction to it.

Here’s my general observation, from this incident, and others like it. 9/11 was terrible. I understand that people in Boston (where two flights originated), New York and DC might be a little more humorless about potential threats.

But 9/11 involved massive airliners crashing into buildings and killing thousands. Yet today, the truck driver at the Port of Miami with language issues, or the Ga. Tech student playing with 2 liter bottles and dry ice, or, yes, some dreadlocked performance artist making probably $50-$100 to distribute battery powered LED’s … are reacted to as a comparable threat.

And it’s not just the politicans and/or cops. Yesterday CNN covered this relentlessly, referring to it completely inaccurately as a “bomb hoax” (implying intent that never existed). Fox News was asking if corporations were trying to profit from our fears. No, guys, I think you’ve cornered the market on that one.

But the bottom line is that, today, you could probably start a terrorist scare with a bottle of Diet Coke and some Mentos. I know, Al Qaeda could still attack us. A real legitimate Big One. But if their goal was simply to terrorize us in the purest sense, in our day to day lives, to judge by the news lately it seems like Osama can start making his own “Mission Accomplished” banner.

I also wanted to take the time to answer the question that leads off this editorial from the staff of the Boston Herald

“OK, so when will the people of Boston see Ted Turner and his nitwit marketing gurus marched into federal court in handcuffs and leg irons?“

When? Never. Because “in May 2006, Ted Turner attended his last meeting as a board member of Time Warner and officially bid adieu to the legacy he created at Turner Broadcasting.” And he claimed he’d lost all control over operations long before he officially left.

As any solid newspaper ought to know. What’s the matter, do you guys not have a single fact checker on staff? Or are you so editorially overheated that facts no longer matter?

I couldn’t agree more. I subscribe to Ad Age on-line and occasionally comment on news items. This is what I sent to them today, after a Turner Broadcasting spokesperson described the debacle as “a marketing stunt gone terribly awry.”

A marketing stunt gone terribly awry? How about a country gone terribly awry? Although I labor in the same fields as the rest of you, I’m not overly-geeked about marketing stunts. But this “tempest in a teapot” is a reflection of what a nation of cowards we’ve been turned into by a decidedly right-leaning media. You can’t leave an umbrella on a bus without causing an expensive, massive anxiety attack, it seems. And so far as “marketing stunts gone terribly awry” are concerned, I’d include the Super Bowl, NASCAR, American Idol and the preemptive invasion of Iraq.

Editorial Page? Facts?

‘dude, they’re supposed to stay separate. That’s why we put them in different sections of the paper.