This is not a bomb
Adult Swim, the late night, mature portion of the Cartoon Network, started a “guerilla” marketing campaign for the show, and upcoming movie, Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Two weeks ago they installed 400 2′ tall LED Mooninites (two characters from the show) in outdoor locations in 10 cities. There are several in Chicago — the above picture was taken tonight at the Lawrence Red Line Stop and there are also ones at Belmont & Broadway and around Halsted & Webster.
In Boston today, someone freaked out about the devices, some of which were located on bridges, and called them into the police as a bomb threat. The city responded by closing down several major roads and subway lines.
The Boston Metblog is all over the coverage in Boston, of course.
And the Adult Swim message boards are, to say the least, rather active right now.
There’s a lot of “they should have known this could panic people in our post 9/11 blah-de-blah” being thrown around, but people in 9 other cities saw these things for two to three weeks and shrugged their shoulders (or pulled them down and took them home) and got on with their lives. Freaking the fuck out over anything you don’t immediately recognize is exactly what the terrorists want.
The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. [Bruce Schneier]