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Boston vs San Francisco: a battle of wits!

posted by on February 1st, 2007  

So, an artist makes some blinky adverts for an upcoming major motion picture, featuring a well-recognized cartoon character, and the Boston police go ballistic and have the bomb squad detonate one of them. Pretty typical for Boston.. Well, then they arrest the artist who made the blinkies! They are holding him on terrorism charges, and calling a bunch of LEDs connected to some batteries a PIPE BOMB! Crazy, right?

Well, last year San Francisco police detonated a flashlight that was left in a Starbucks bathroom by a homeless guy. A fucking flashlight! From CNN:

SAN FRANCISCO, California (CNN) — An explosive device was found in a Starbucks coffee shop in central San Francisco on Monday. The building was evacuated and a police bomb squad disarmed the device, authorities said.

A Starbucks employee found the device about 1:15 p.m. (4:15 p.m. ET) on the coffee shop’s bathroom floor, police spokesman Neville Gittens said.

“If it had detonated, it would have caused damage,” Gittens said. “It was what we consider an IED,” an improvised explosive device.

Acutally, it was just a flashlight. And guess what? They arrested the flashlight dude too.

Filed under: , · 9 Comments

9 Responses to “Boston vs San Francisco: a battle of wits!”

  1. bobslobster
    February 1st, 2007 | 1:06 pm

    I would’ve blown them up too! That mooninite looked pretty threatening and blinky. At least adult swim had the decency to make a formal apology for causing such a ruckus. Watch out Jess, Rajbot and I are going to take you to watch the whole ATHF movie in the theater! Mooninites and all!

  2. rajbot
    February 1st, 2007 | 6:57 pm

    Here is the Boston Hearld’s take on it, in which they refer to Berdovsky as Borat:

    Hey Borat, you’re not a citizen? That’s too bad. How does five years at Cedar Junction sound, followed by a steerage-class flight back to the Third World hellhole from which you came, to annoy the taxpaying citizens?

    Also, Berdovsky happens to be a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend..

  3. Q
    February 1st, 2007 | 7:27 pm

    So apparently (from reading many of these articles) anything with wires and batteries is a bomb. Blinky lights make it even more explosive.

    So does that mean the Ranch is like a nuclear blinky bomb just waiting to go off?

    Just think what might have happened if those guys had had access to 3.1 ounces of hand cream. THAT stuff is scary. But maybe it wouldn’t explode unless it was at the airport. Terrorism science is so hard.

  4. jess
    February 1st, 2007 | 10:30 pm

    A ruckus, indeed! Bob, I am considering myself warned, and I will be preparing my mooninite costume for the above mentioned movie-viewing. Urgh! I wonder if the movie will play the opening theme song every 15 minutes like they do on cartoon network. =)

  5. rajbot
    February 1st, 2007 | 11:19 pm

    Bunnie Huang has some stickers available for artists who have the misfortune of living in Boston:

    I spent 10 good years in Boston while I attended MIT, and I carried around plenty of devices that could be classified as “suspicious looking” by Coakley’s standards, such as the “nerd kits” that we used to build our electronics labs.

    So, for the hackers, students, and artists in Boston, here’s a little something for you. Give the Boston authorities a clue, because it seems like they need one:

  6. Q
    February 2nd, 2007 | 12:56 pm

    This reminds me of the This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb stuff from last year. For a photo of the sticker in action, go here.

    I’m totally gonna get some of those stickers from Bunnie Huang and stick them on EVERYTHING in the electrical engineering department.

  7. bobslobster
    February 2nd, 2007 | 1:00 pm

    We can only hope they play the theme song at LEAST every fifteen minutes during the movie. It’s gonna be sweet…

  8. rajbot
    February 3rd, 2007 | 2:03 am

    We need to evacuate the city!!!

  9. rajbot
    February 9th, 2007 | 8:55 pm

    Here is the Wooster Collective take:

    Fuck you guys. You’re acting like you’re some cool iconoclast artists who should become some mythic heros for all of us because you can mock the media and show that you’re above them. You’re not Abbie Hoffman. You’re acting like all you did was put up some renegade art. But you didn’t. You were employees and employees only. You did it for money. Don’t act like what you did was counter-culture and renegade. I don’t give a fuck what your hair looks like, you’re more “mainstream” then my mother is.

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