Charlie on the MBTA. A comment suggests that the "circuit board" may be a bit of LED guerilla advertising by the Mooninites. Oops.
The Bostonist.
BostonChannel.com.
Thanks to Keri for the headzup!
Keep on keepin on~
* Minutes later, and...
Ayep... looking at the small photo provided with the story at cbs4.com, I'd have to say Charlie's commenter is not in Err-or (*groan* I know =).These Errs (not exactly "hoaxes") look to be an evolved form of throwies.
* By the end of the day, the news is reporting that the devices are part of a marketing campaign. [ADULT SWIM]
* After midnight. Found a dropping at Wired. Also, while in Harvard Square I overheard that "detonated" meant blasted with a water canon, and that the Allston New England Comics store was reported as having a "suspicious device" in its window as well.
Oops, those are Ignignokt, not Err, right?
2 comments:
Komedy! I can't believe people thought these were terrorist devices...
I guess I can understand the panic if you're not a nerdy and/or stoner Adult Swim fan. Especially after hearing that a bomb squad was called in to investigate the first one.
That aside, if you assume these were dangerous suspicious devices (more dangerous even than a conquering Mooninite), well, it seems that most of them have been up in location for weeks now before being noticed (and causing alarm) during the day.
On top of that, the Allston NEComics shop certainly knew the nature of the device in their window, and many a blogger and flickr-er seemed to guess or recognize them quite early in the afternoon. But some kind of official acknowledgement didn't come til late in the day.
The notion of damage control comes to mind as a reason for the delay. No Good way to explain this mistake, of course. I suppose the demonstration of community vigilance in finding the devices after the first one is a positive.
I wonder how many people on the side of the authorities passed on the ATHF news only to have it blocked somewhere along the way up the intelligence chain. Or how many people on site, passersby and officials, knew, but were ignored or perhaps didn't say, in light of the resources applied to it all.
Maybe Homeland Security could benefit from some grassroots neighborhood watch-type reporting. Not explicit patrolling (no mobs of townspeople, thank you), but reports from people about new and different whatnot on their regular commutes. No doubt many local, neighborhood, and town-centric blogs probably cover this sort of thing now.
Now that they've been outed, I'd say that these LED ads would be ideal trojan horses for someone who was up for some seriously dangerous activities. Future promotions of this type will absolutely have to run into resistance.
For some more follow-up reading and commentary, I recommend popping back to Charlie.
No one's said anything about the profanity issue, what with the middle digit and all. =)
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