When toys attack...

The world is going to hell in a handbasket.

Okay, maybe not literally straight to hell, no matter how much some of the good Evangelical Christians may be trying to push up the schedule for the Rapture, but you know what I mean.

A major American city was brought to a stop by...gasp!... Light Brites? Yes, several devices which can only be described as...well, Light Brites with battery packs were placed in cities around the country to promote Cartoon Network's Aqua Teen Hunger Force. The Light Brites displayed characters called Mooninites (I think that's how it's spelled, anyway) giving the finger. Giving the finger the best that a Mooninite on a Light Bright can give the finger, anyway.


Do I think that officials in Boston over-reacted? Well, yes and no. I can certainly understand being alarmed to find the electronic things laying around. During the day, I suppose that an LED card (which would not really look like a Light Brite) and a battery pack could be suspicious, but would it have been so hard to investigate, realize what it was (are you telling me there was no one single person within the Boston Police Department that knows about Aqua Teen Hunger Force and didn't recognize the Mooninites?) and dismiss it as a prank at worse?

Do I think that Turner Broadcasting should get into trouble for this? No. They hired an advertising agency to come up with a marketing gimick, the agency came up with the gimick and hired to idiots to carry it out. We'll get to the idiots later. I've heard a lot of people say that Turner Broadcasting should have realized that this was a bad idea. Now unless you believe that villains actually think and plot the way that the villains in the Batman series and movies do, who would think of a Light Brite with a cartoon character giving the finger would make a clever bomb? The bottom line is that they hired an agency to come up with the idea, execute the idea and presumably deal with any issues that arose from the campaign.

Do I think that the advertising agency should get into trouble for this? Well...yes. Not for the idea, mind you. The only way I can imagine those LED thing-ies being even remotely dangerous is if The Joker was behind them (and only if The Joker was being portrayed by Jack Nicholson at the time that the Light Brite bombs were being assembled). The agency could have moved faster when the whole scare started, though, instead of seeing how many Mooninites the Boston bomb squad would blow up. Would it have been that hard to pick up the phone, call Boston and said "Listen, about those suspicious devices that you've found..."

Should the idiots that put the devices up get into trouble? Absolutely. Yes, they were hired to do a job, and that is what they did. But...they also were very much aware of the panic that those devices caused, and even videotaped what was going on while laughing at the chaos being caused. They should have come forward right away and put and end to the whole thing instead of revelling in the limelight and making their stupid comments after they were arraigned and released on bail.

I still do not understand how anyone could have looked at those devices and thought that it was a bomb, but I do understand being concerned about what it was. How paranoid have we become when anything that has lights and wires and batteries is assumed to be some weapon to destroy us? Everything could potentially be a bomb, so does that mean that I should dial 911 and report it if someone leaves the restaurant and forgets his cell phone? Should I be arrested as a terrorist if I put my old VCR out in the dumpster? I've still got one of those big, unweildly cassette player/recorders from the early 80's...I wonder if it could be used to rob a bank?

I don't need a lecture about this being a post-911 world. I'm quite well aware of what happened that day, and we've made the terrorists more successful then they ever imagined. When we use the events of that day as an excuse to panic about every little thing then we have put ourselves into a prison of our own design. There is a big difference between being observant and being paranoid.

You want to defeat the terrorists? Start by letting go of the fear and living your life.

Sometimes a Light Brite is just a Light Brite.