Apparently they think when you fall in a hole, you can dig your way out. Idiots.

Long straight curly fuzzy snaggy shaggy ratty matty oily greasy fleecy shining gleaming streaming flaxen waxen knotted polka-dotted twisted beaded braided powdered flowered confettied bangled tangled spangled and spaghettied.

Stupid move? Maybe.
Stupid charges? Yes.

They're getting blamed for the overreaction of others.
If they aren't cleared of all charges, I'm losing ALL faith in the system.

I can't believe people thought that those mooninites were bombs. Seriously. They were blowing them up? Man. "Widespread panic"? Gee whiz.

I am fully in support of these guys, after the entire company I worked for was flushed down the toilet because of other peoples ignorance, fear, misunderstanding, lack of reading comprehension, greed, and tendency to overreact and melodramatize anything and everything.

ANYone who doesn't recognize the power of the quad laser -- remember, jumping ... is useless! -- deserves mockery and inane talk about hairstyles of the 70s.

These boys are national heroes and they deserve a medal.

They will however have to learn to share it.

Uhm. Yeah. I suppose if I was going to martyr myself for a "post-9/11" cause, I probably wouldn't use corporate co-opted surrealism as my pivot point.

So the litebrite Errs were in 10 cities across the U S of A for two weeks. During that time countless people saw them and maybe a few police authorities saw them. But it took Boston to see the battery powered LiteBrite Mooninite as a threat.

I applaud those guys for taking the matter with the weight it deserved. It wasn't the little Errs giving the finger everywhere that was the problem. The problem was the cops overreacted to a non threat. I'm sick and fucking tired of this. We still can't bring 4oz bottles of shampoo on an airplane. Now we can't have lightbrites!

They pleaded not guilty to charges of placing a hoax device in a way that causes panic and disorderly conduct. The two men seemed to have trouble keeping their composure as Assistant Attorney General John Grossman described the battery-powered characters as "bomb-like devices."

The charges against these guys shouldn't stick. The ad was not a hoax device. If it was some road flares with an alarm clock wrapped around it and "TNT" [another Turner channel!] then maybe you could call it a hoax.

Boston Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis issued a time line this afternoon that showed that the companies involved in the marketing campaign did not acknowledge responsibility for the bomb scares for another three hours when Boston police detectives were contacted by company officials at 4:30 p.m.

Because they weren't responsible for the bomb scares! If anything they were responsible for littering and defacing public property. Not the same thing. I think the officials in Boston are more embarrassed will stick it to these guys and Turner [have the petitions to remove Cartoon Network from Boston's cable channels started yet?]

Last night on [adult swim] most of the bumps were written by Turner/Time Warner/etc's legal department. This is the kind of stuff that would make great material for the shows. After all Err shut down Boston!

[quotes come from this article.]

So apparently there was hoax pipe bombs in Boston yesterday. They know who did it, but charges have not been filed.

So a marketing ploy gets two guys charged for felonies. Yet a guy that sets out to scare people with fake pipe bombs walks?

I hope those two little pseudo surrealists get the snot beat out of them by the Red Sox. I HOPED that the artists involved would have a little bit of humility about the reaction, even while defending what they did.

Grace, i have no idea what kind of coverage you've seen of this stuff but all this anger is weirdly misplaced.
Not so long ago you were talking about how you wanted go about spray painting things and i suggested throwies instead. Throwies can be removed without chemicals and labor and resurfacing and if anything are pleasant.
Someone saw wires and freaked out.
Then other people who should have known better caused a panic with misinformation.
Money was wasted, people were worried and they want to find people to blame.
People who really shouldn't be apologizing have been apologizing just to ameliorate people who want to be spastic cacklemonkeys.
There was no hoax, there was no bomb, there wasn't even really a push to get people to watch the Aqua Teen so much as a shout out to Aqua Teen fans and an amusing visual diversion.
Why you want to focus the issues on scapegoats like the worst of the ignorant journalists going on about it is beyond me.
Comedy shows you would think would be happily going on about it have generally avoided it except for extremely weak jokes that ignore the ugliness about the dumb mistakes and the scapegoating for sad little allusions to cartoons and bomb scares, so people are being sensitive to any issues one might validly have.

Comedy is a bellwether.
It's good to check the wind and wonder where it's coming from, the weather or a man made stink.

Hi ethylene, thanks for that. I should clarify: I don't blame the artists whatsoever. The blame goes entirely to the police leadership, which is maybe 5 or fewer people, who made the error in judgment interpreting these things as bombs. Everybody else behaved as they were supposed to behave during a terrorist alert.

All I wanted from the artists at this press conference was a little nod to the reality of the situation, instead of discussion of hairstyles. They don't need to apologise for the campaign but any artist in the reality-based community should have a thought or two for the actual reactions to their art once it's been released in the wild. All I want from these guys is a little bit of respect for their audience, or maybe a little acknowledgment that their audience is bigger than the crowd of fellow artists and cultural elites with whom they likely communicate most frequently.

Maybe they shouldn't be pummeled in the Fenway dugout. Maybe they should just each suffer a really annoying and personally mortifying incident in the next 6 months, like dog-poo shoes at a meeting or an email forwarded to just exactly the wrong person by mistake.

I am not opposed to situationism, street theater, installations, comedic or artistic use of serious or light concepts, or media-intervention as art. Banksy, for example, does a great job with it. He puts a bound Guantanamo figure in a zoo. He paints a pink elephant. He paints on the apartheid wall. Spray paint can't be confused with a bomb, but some of his works barely, possibly could. If he caused something like Boston I think his response might be a bit more interesting than the press conference we saw today.

I think that one possible point that the artists could have been making was that the security response of cities - the apparatus that triggered the reactions - is meaningless in stopping terrorism. This might be true, but I didn't get that from the guys today. I am a dunce at art so this could be entirely me.