"It had a very sinister appearance. It had a battery behind it, and wires"

Stop taking this thing soo seriously, it was just a light bright and it was in other states already?!You really think terrorist would make a little block man?Idiots....

On a cost/benefit level, if a Lite Brite can paralyze a major U.S. city, then acquiring weapons grade radioactive materials seems like a real waste of time and funding.
I like the Grossman line about "If these had been explosive devices, they could have caused a lot of damage." If my butt was a thermonuclear device, it could take out a city.

This country is becoming more of a joke everyday! As much as people make fun of Canada maybe we should all think about moving there!

My brain hurts... This whole situation was absolutely ridiculous!!Ah but wait! It all makes perfect sense now... GW must have seen Sadam playing Light Brite with Osama Bin Laden and realized it has batteries and Wires, it must be a WMD! I miss common sense and Habus Corpus....

When I first heard it was circuit boards, I thought maybe their reaction was appropriate. But after seeing the light bright devices it seems a big over-reaction. The police blew up some of them. They got close enough to blow them up, and yet someone didn't say "Hey, it's a light bright with an alien on it."... And why blow up a suspected bomb?

"It has lights! It must be a bomb!"
If it had a timer counting down... yes, I would be concerned...but it didn't. Get a grip people.

I was angry to see Adult Swim apologizing for this. Not at AS, but at the ridiculous situation that forced them to appease the Fun Nazis.

Ridiculous!

Rather than posting your smug and condescending comments (Do you feel better about yourself?) try seeing the situation in context and try to understand why law enforcement and government officials are so jumpy. Areas of concentrated populations, landmarks, bridges, airports and train stations are watched with hypervigilance. Most of us know enough not to leave a bag or a strange device unattended at one of these locations. Should circuiut boards with batteries and happy lights be excempt? The next train station bomber now knows to just slap an add with a picture of baby Stewie on his bag. You'll just look at it and laugh.

Thank you so much for writing pointing out the fact that the boston security personnel made the mistake and the media have been fanning the flames. The world would be a much better place if its inhabitants had half the common sense James has.

maybe when halloween comes around you better not be wearing blinking lights in boston. the "authorities" may just blow you up and ask questions later.

this whole insane incident just shows how paranoid and misguided our "homeland security" apparatus really is. shutting down airport terminals because of milk bottles, entrapping some homeless guys in miami into a "terrorist plot" to blow up the sears tower. and now the ultimate. shutting down an entire city because of lite-brites.

it would've been much better for the boston authorites to just admit the mistake and hush hush it, but now that the cat's out of the bag and the whole country knows about it, they're looking like paranoid fools.

I can't believe it made world news - it was headlines in google - BBC, Time, CNN. it was a bloody moonanite - doesn't anyone in the Boston police force watch Aqua teen? batteries and LED's on a circuit board! How over-reactive can you get.

Someone saw lights on a wall
Bombs here in boston?
they're sure to kill us all
Call out the police
Quick stop the T
In country ruled by fear
Now we need to arrest somebody

Pull yourself together!

NOT an MIT stunt.

Dad

It's all so embarrassing. So embarrassing. The only thing I'm happy about is that I live in Philadelphia, where the campaign has been running for a couple of weeks, and so far no-one has even batted an eye.

Next time they produce a large numbers of false Flexi_Teller Machines in the city. That would be good for the economy and for the art.Not to mention the news media.

correction

It brings to mind the words of FDR:

"...the only thing we have to fear, is fear itself."

Well I am hearing now that the city wants CNN/Time Warner to pay for the $500,000 cost of the homeland security bill for this mishap. Okay... so we have been taking millions out to pay for homeland security.. and now it costs $500,000 more to utilize them? something doesn't add up. It's kind of like asking for you to pay for the firefighters time after they put out a fire in your house... isn't all their salary already paid? their budget is already determined every year..... isn't homeland security the same way? it's sad that a light brite incident can somehow cost someone $500,000 in ADDITIONAL fees.

I am ashamed to say this happened in the US... batteries and wires.. isn't that EVERY digital camera... walkman... cell phone.... boombox.... etc.. I love the guys that were arrested only responding to questions about 80's style haircuts. That truly made me laugh. :)

The compensation Mayor Menino is asking from Turner is $750,000, a small sum considering the huge amount of publicity this story is generating for a TV show the vast majority of people had never heard of before this "stunt". As a point of fact, it does cost more when bomb scares happen, not because the police and fire crews on duty are paid more, but because people on duty are kept on duty and thus paid overtime while the city seeks to beef up security in case something does happen, and specialists such as bomb squads have to be called in . $750,000 is nothing and by all accounts the MBTA handled it remarkably smoothly. The other point no one has addressed is the possiblity that the people calling 911 during this whole thing were on Turner's payroll, aiming to draw some attention. Also, when one of the two suspects called Turner around 1 PM to ask if he should pull the plug on the ploy, he was told no. Turner only apologized after 5...after the market had closed and the whole world suddenly was familiar with some random cartoon.

Look, we aren't being terrorized by terrorists, we are being terrorized by our own ignorance. What can I compare this to? The flocks of people sent into the streets during the broadcast of "War of the worlds"? Or maybe I can compare the arrest of the two "instigators" to some kind of neo-McCarthyism...no, no one would know what the hell I was talking about.

i think this just goes to show how paranoic the american society became, and paranoia is the first step toardes dictatorship.

Well we need to get the details about how many people truly called 911... if other cities had no problems with this promotion, what is it saying about what happened in Boston? Maybe a city worker found one, called it in.... and then everything went down hill from there.. I do think it was handled poorly... and most of this fear comes from the administration drilling it in that we could be "attacked at any time" message... day in and out. that's what we heard for the past few years... as if before 9/11 we couldn't have been hit just as easily.... the fear justifies the end... fear creates jobs.. justifies the spending... gives us false security to think all this money we are throwing at a "potential" problem will make everything ok.... I have more of a fear dying from a drunk driver, not a terrorist attack... yet our governments make huge amounts in tax off alcohol sales... so my fear never goes away (was involved in a chase where a drunk driver tried to ram me after I called the police on them, they refused to stop for the police too)...

If that is paranoia, then I am satisfied. I think you all are forgetting what kind of world we live in today. So what if these people were DOING THEIR JOB and investigating a potential bomb threat as if it were real and not shrugging it off? Do we really want one to slip by because it looks like a Lite-Bright or any other kind of toy? Because that's all it takes, really, is one homemade bomb to blow up you or anyone else at the wrong time in the wrong place.

I'm glad someone is doing their job. I'm glad we have some people who are "paranoid". Stay vigilant, stay sober, and stay alive.

Further more, I'd like to add that I hate how fickle, forgetful, or just plain ignorant people can be. Investigating an object that is out of place isn't stupid. It's especially warranted if the authorities don't even know it's there. If they knew it was there they wouldn't have worried about it, but some of these objects were placed on people's private property.

Look at it this way... It took two, almost three, weeks before some body noticed these "devices". Most of our intelligence agencies are trying their best to keep close tabs on terrorist organizations or groups. So when they find something like this, after it being there for two or so weeks, and no one knows anything about it? Yeah it's going to cause a bit of a panic. They didn't expect this stuff to be where it was. Also, being that there was more than one of them placed all around these cities, the thinking could have been "Hey some of these might be decoys, and only one or two of them have to be the real thing. They're trying to slow us down with these decoys".

Sounds like it to me, anyways.

Exactly. Take the bomb in "Face/Off" for instance. It had a cutesy-weird cartoon drawing on it or something, but did that make it any less lethal? I think not. So what if the title of "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" includes no menacing forward slash? So what if Nicolas Cage wasn't running around Boston with his eyes bugged out, followed by John Travolta doing the same? The masterminds of this plot should be sent to a supermaximum security prison on an oil rig out in the ocean or something, and kept in isolation so that they can't pass their terror secrets on to other bad guys.

Let's include the following additional information and thoughts into the discussion...

1. The police that morning had found 2 conventional pipe bombs at Tufts-New England Medical Center and attached to the Longfellow Bridge.
2. An employee running out of the Tufts-New England Medical Center told a security guard that "it's going to be a bad day."
3. A series of phone calls coming into 911 about the sighting of suspicous devices didn't identify them as being as part of a marketing campaign -- and in the absence of that information, police did not know if they were responding to additional pipe bombs, "diversions," or a marketing hoax.
4. While the police were chasing down the bogus 911 calls, Interference Inc. sent an email to its artists NOT to contact authorities about the campaign, which might have helped the situation.
5. Turner reportedly held off contacting Boston police until 4:30 PM that day, well after the day's events had run much of the course.

** Would it have been prudent for the police to have ignored calls coming into 911 the rest of the day about supposed "device sightings"? That's a hell of an assmuption, and we all know about assumptions...
** Who were making those 911 calls - the marketers? Is this responsible behavior?
** Why didn't Interference Inc. and/or Turner contacting the police immediately with info on their hoax -- since both knew what was happening (given Interference had emailed their Boston counterparts to keep the info on the "down low", and the other saw fit to give it ongoign CNN coverage)?

And while on the "homeland security" topic, let's throw in the Los Angeles Times stunt to promote the Mission Impossible movie that involved planting electronics in their side walk news stands -- "LA Times faces legal action over news-stand 'bomb' alert."

Knowing the above may help put different "spin" on the day & the follow-on discussions of homeland security and corporate PR/responsiblities.

When Lite Brites are outlawed, only outlaws will have Lite Brites.