Aqua Teen Hunger Force shuts down Boston

Anybody else finding this to be just a little bit funny?

IMHO it's pathetic that we have become such giant pu55y5 that something like this could scare us enuff to shut down highways

I want to meet the person that thought a Lite Brite picture giving them the finger might be a bomb.

That person needs a smack to the head.

Of course in this day and age "ya gotta be careful"

F#$%ing stupidity.

Ize

Yeah, That was freaking wicked awesome funny!
Especially after they showed what the 'objects' actually were.

I actually watch ATHF, and think its a great cartoon. Carl reminds me of every neighbor I had growing up in Jersey.

beer4breakfast said:

Not only have we become a nation of "giant pu55y5", but a mean and vindictive one at that; one that takes delight in exercising force and doling out punishments.

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That's only the lawyers, politicians, and whatever suckers they can seduce into their little worlds.

However sometimes when I read the news I hear banjos...

Ize

I fully agree that this was overreaction, but just to put one thing in perspective... I haven't seen any footage, so I am not 100%, but if they are talking about the location I think, it is a bus & subway station that has an elevated interstate above it stacked 4 northbound lanes over 4 southbound, which is often backed up with vehicles even not during rush hour... potentially alot of victims.

As for a lawsuit and charging the guy they arrested, slap his wrist, and turner/cartoon network should happily pay the fine for the unbelievable advertising they got

Hippie said:

As for a lawsuit and charging the guy they arrested, slap his wrist, and turner/cartoon network should happily pay the fine for the unbelievable advertising they got

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Unbelievable is an understatement! Almost everyone in the U.S. has now seen a Mooninite flippin' the bird and knows what Adult Swim is.

Bad publicity is better than no publicity.

IMHO, I think it's ridiculous, but then again I knew beforehand what a Mooninite was. I can see how it scared some people, you know, a panel with LEDs and a couple AA batteries attached is pretty scary!

Apparently it only takes a few cartoons to bring the entire city of Boston to it's knees.

Someone grabbed one before the ATF and is making loot off of it:

http://cgi.ebay.com/Mooninites-Igni...goryZ363QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

I can hear both sides of this. The way it all unfolded, it's easy to laugh at the reaction as over the top. Typical armchair quarterbacking. Lets say, though, that they WERE bombs...and some intern at the police department, TV station, blog whateva, points out that they resemble some cartoon character. Everybody assumes it's a hoax, the bombs go off, then everybody is up in arms that the police weren't vigilant enough.

Just assume for a second that you don't know what the moon-thing, or adult swim, or ATHF is. You see a strange board with a torpedo-shaped roll and wires stuck to the underside of a bridge or tied to the structural supports of a major highway. I WANT the police to take that seriously, I don't want to be tricked into another US-soil tragedy because we assume something is not a threat when it really is.

I'll take the way it actualy unfolded anyday. And of course Turner should pay the city for the massive expense. I don't understandhow people are mainly getting mad at the law enforcement and politicians and not seeing that what Turner did was a very bad idea.

I actualy resent the notion that we are now "pussies" because we are more alert domesticly. Maybe police shoud 'man up' when they see a wired, electrical taped tube straped to a bridge - nah, it's nothing. Maybe the cops at the Canadian border partol should just relax and not search cars, that guy is covered in blood and has a bloody axe, maybe it's a haloween gag (actually happened). Maybe our loved ones over in Iraq should just grow some balls and stop jumping every time a car goes a bit too fast towards a roadblock. Is that what we are saying here??

eh, if Turner didn't have permission to put them where they did, then yes they are in the wrong and should definintely pay for damage like ANY grafitti artist would. If they did have permission or its a public place for advertising and hanging up flyers, pamphlets, etc., then maybe police should have checked with the owner of the structure before going crazy. I'm not sure which way it went down though, so I can't judge.

Uh those things were there for 2-3 WEEKS...If they were bombs they would have went off a long time ago. Also, they had them in 10 other cities yet, I didnt see NY or LA 'shut down'.

beer4breakfast said:

As for how the city handled the actual incident; well, they could have done so with much less made-for-TV drama.

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Totally agreed. The TV coverage is what made it so sensationalistic - but that's par forthe course. I still don't know why I have to hear about Tyra Banks being "fat" for 6 days in a row on the "news". TV nowadays blows everything out of proportion.
<Side note, if Tyra Banks if fat, I have no words to describe RosieO>

Torben Ulrich said:

Uh those things were there for 2-3 WEEKS...If they were bombs they would have went off a long time ago. Also, they had them in 10 other cities yet, I didnt see NY or LA 'shut down'.

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That's true, but the officers on the ground didn't know that. I can't fault them for their reation, or their bosses reaction. I'd rather them do what they did than disregard dozens of phone calls. From what I read, it was one package specifically that set it all off. It was strapped to the structural support for Route 93 at the Sullivan Square train station (major location). The police got dozens of call yesterday morning from pussies taking the train that a weird looking package was strapped to the bridge. From there, they were spotted in dozens of locations in a very short amount of time. It's easy to second-guess that someone in the chain of command should have figured it out but hey, I'm not going to fault an officer or soldier for taking great precautions on-the-spot before all the facts are knows and filtered down to the people on the street.

As for the advertising being up in other cities without reaction, I don't know where they were placed. It seems to me that it is up to the individual 'subcontractors' that were hired to place them by the ad company, which is why they are going after they 2 guys in Boston. However, apparently Turner or cartoon network new where they were, so they should have had oversight saying maybe this place or that wouldn't be proper...

So with the 'device' being discovered at Sullivan Square station attached to a highway support, I would have been pissed if the cops hadn't shut that area down. I don't know about all the other shutdowns, without knowing where the other ads were placed.

I think the ones that cause the most stir were the Sullivan Square one, one under the Longfellow bridge, one at New England Medical Center, one at South Station, two one each side of the pedestrian bridge @ the Hatch Shell over Storrow Drive, and one at Fenway mad: ).

Regarding Mayor Mumbles Menino......he isn't known around here for making sense. I always hate it when he gets on national news.....he's a freaking peon.

What I want to know is what kind of friggin' idiots thought these things were bombs? On the radio this morning they made it sound like they were these scary looking things, but to me they looked like a neon bar sign!

I think the 2 guys they arrested for this are handling it perfectly. They would only answer questions from the press about hair styles. They know they did nothing illegal, yeah it was stupid but fortunately stupid isn't always illegal, so they're having some fun with it. It also probably helps knowing Ted Turner is picking up your legal bills.....

alemonkey said:

What I want to know is what kind of friggin' idiots thought these things were bombs? On the radio this morning they made it sound like they were these scary looking things, but to me they looked like a neon bar sign!

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It probably has more to do with where they were located than anything. If I saw something that generally looked like some kind of neon sign where I ordinarily would expect to see one, I wouldn't be so suspicious. When you suddenly see something like this in odd places, it's better to be safe than sorry. All the authorities acted appropriately. And how about for once, won't someone stand up and give the people who reported these things a big hand. Also lets give a big hand to all those who went into action, especially the bomb squad members. Those guys didn't know what they were going to come across; but they went out and put their necks on the line anyway. Guess what folks, it's a post 9/11 world; and I'm deathly afraid of the people who want to turn it back into the world it was on 9/10. There are plenty of people out there who would love to brutally slaughter every man, woman and child in this country; and do it with a big smile on their face. They'll always have some excuse relative to world policy for their hatred of us; but even if we retreated from every corner of the earth and hid within our borders and never spoke another word about what happens outside, they would still want us dead. Ultimately they just don't like the way we live. To all those radicals, we are Satan incarnate. We are devils.

So sorry about the little tirade; but wake up and face the new reality. This ad campaign was completely irresponsible and I'm sure they knew damn well what the potential fall out would be. In fact I'm sure they were ready to sit there and have one big laugh when they watched a city go into panic. They just never realized that the last laugh was going to be on the city of Boston.

I think it's just nuts. I've been living in Boston for four years since 9/11 and I've never seen rampant paranoia and hysteria on this scale. I agree, it is a "post-9/11" world. We need to be somewhat more vigilant. But to fly off the hand and close half the city over a couple of light-brights? Jesus.

A few years back they removed the trash cans on the Commuter Rail in order to "fight terrorism". Of course people, such as myself, can still carry bulky suspicious packages onto crowded trains without the MBTA so much as batting an eye. And now, because of the lack of trash cans, the trains are covered with trash and smell like sh*t.

It's phony crap to make people feel safe without actually doing it. Five minutes worth of phone calls could have saved Boston $500,000 and a lot of wasted time.

Please forgive my rant. For the last three days Boston has been filled with so much moral indignation I feel like jumping into the Charles river.

I was thinking about this and wondering how much of it is cultural? I mean it seems the problem was that this wasn't readily identifiable not that it was suspicious. If it was a batman logo everyone would have "gotten it". A big superman "s" and it would have looked like a superman s on a lightbright. Instead this was a random series of lights attached to a post. So is this a problem with content? No one recognised it so it must be scary? So then what is scary to us? How many people know what a bomb looks like? I don't think this is a case of yelling "fire" or deliberatly going "boo" but it may be that we don't know what IS scary. We don't know what to look out for. No-one said boo but they said something that someone might mistake for boo.

"That's not a hair question!"

"Ehh, my client is a performance artist."