and all was well.

tuesday morning: woke up feeling crappy. went to work. worked. had brief, futile debate with managing editor about the dubious ethics and general distastefulness of using previously published research from one journal to meet page count of a different journal without telling the authors we were using their work or telling the readers the work had been published previously, by us. felt crappy.

tuesday afternoon: left work feeling crappy. parked car in moat of slush interspersed with rock-solid chunks of ice. found recycling bin in street alongside three or four items apparently deemed unworthy of recycling by the city's crew. slipped on ice picking them up. felt crappy (and wet).

tuesday evening: went to see the lemonheads at the paradise. read an excellent short story by cate kennedy, called "black ice," in between opening acts; felt better.

tuesday night: rocked out like a fool to the lemonheads for just under an hour and a half. clapped my hands and hopped up and down like a small child being presented with a gingerbread house big enough to live in at the start of every song i recognized (i.e., every song), amusing the gentleman to my right no end. realized my own happiness had inspired mirth in others. felt awesome. skipped and danced down the street to my car to the tune of "great big no," the rhythm warming all my insides like sunshine jelly. found a dry place to park. fell asleep grinning like an idiot, with my ears not even ringing.

wednesday morning: woke up with small black cat draped over my entire face, her bony right elbow digging into my surprisingly pain-free jaw. realized my eyes were clear and i could breathe normally. upon leaving the apartment, saw that all of the ice had melted from my front steps and sidewalk. at work, did not have expected instructions from boss to revamp year-old articles for sneaky reprinting. heard birds chirping sweetly from sun-warmed rooftop outside window.

it's an old story, but i'll tell it again: evan dando fixes everything. perhaps he's a god of something other than rock. at the very least, i intend to go on worshiping him as my private household deity, as he's done me nothing but good over the past fifteen years. if only i'd thought to throw myself a dance party a week ago, we might never have had to suffer through these long, dark days of numbing separation. no matter--i am healed. a round of applause for mr. dando and all of his magical, medicinal qualities. and i bow my head gratefully to all of you, as well; your support has been tremendously appreciated. we now return you to your regularly scheduled programming, already in progress.

. . . so screw you, inhofe, you impossibly ignorant madman! three cold days does not a climate make! try running this great machine called america with both of your eyes swollen shut, you crazy fool.

lest you grow unduly concerned . . .

my apologies for my extended absence. i have caught a light sneeze, which has taken up residence in the upper quarters of my left nostril. it is a very rude sneeze and has blocked the stairwell in my sinus with its moving boxes and excess packing materials, and the tears living in the apartment above it have been forced to come and go via the fire exit, i.e., my face. they are very busy tears, apparently; i had not been aware of the tremendous number of errands they were accustomed to running until they were forced to take this more conspicuous route, but they are back and forth in droves at all hours of the day and night. this has left the exterior of the building in quite a bit of disarray; yesterday i overheard two of my coworkers discussing the possibility that there had been a death in my family. all of this is more frustrating than debilitating, of course, but i have not been up to fulfilling my superblogger role. i hope you understand. i am getting as much rest as possible and sipping dutifully at my steaming miso soup, and should be back on top of things in no time.

shame on . . . uh . . . not gonna fool me again!

bush to america:

"listen, guys, i know you think i haven't been right about everything in the past, but iran is bad. really, really bad. like, seriously--even though i can't prove it. support the troops!"

america to bush:

"did someone say something? i thought i heard something. it sounded a little like 'wolf'; no one else heard that? really? huh."

happy valentine's day!

because the past twelve months haven't provided me with anything better, i am recycling last year's valentine from david firth, who also loves you platonically. it is yummier than chocolate and less likely to wither and die than flowers, and hallmark's got nothing on it when it comes to filling my days and nights with warmth and cheer. laugh and be merry, my darlings, for tomorrow you might be stabbed sixty times in the abdomen by an unassuming coworker who will then make tender love to or near your seeping corpse.

whole foods and lobster: smooth on the outside, slimy in the middle

i remember being floored by the animal-rights uprising and whole foods' subsequent acts of contrite concession last year regarding the sad plight of the supermarket lobster, my shock resulting primarily from the fact that the debate was taking place at all. if anyone did not know or has forgotten, advocates were up in arms not (publicly, at least) over the fact that the lobster was destined to die horribly in a vat of boiling liquid like a medieval heretic but rather that it was forced to come into routine physical contact with other lobsters in the days prior to its execution. yes, yes, yes, all living creatures should be granted the opportunity to live the best possible life, and lobsters are solitary creatures in the ocean, challenging most any other lobster they encounter in the watery atlantic wilderness to a duel, and your local supermarket's lobster tank is a lot like a veal pen, and the whole thing is endlessly troubling to our beautiful minds. but if you are willing to purchase a lobster and drop it flipping and thrashing into a roiling cauldron--even if you plan to give it a few shots of whiskey first, as my family always did*--there is really no way for me to take your pleas for mercy and humane conditions seriously. the best possible life means the most peaceful death, and head-first into the steaming pot ain't it. if the lobster must die, it seems to me that it ought to be killed right on the boat in the quickest and most painless manner possible. and life in a pvc tube, while perhaps affording a sense of security, isn't really living, and certainly isn't living well--even for a large aquatic arthropod. the innate hypocrisy permeating the entire discussion left a taste in my mouth not unlike that of turned shellfish, as does the senseless rule prohibiting the execution of a condemned prisoner when he or she has a fever. you are against putting others to death or you are not, and the drawing of arbitrary lines regarding when killing is cruel and when it isn't is a meaningless practice that serves only to soothe the draftsman. still, though, when whole foods agreed to stop selling live lobsters, i viewed it as a baby step in the right direction and smiled a weak, less than defeated smile. for about eighteen seconds.

banning the sale of live lobsters was never going to have any impact on the chain's pursuit and acquisition of live lobsters, since the walruses and carpenters who were shedding empathetic tears in the deli department were still dreaming buttery clambake dreams. because the customers are always right, whole foods found a way to get all of the lobsters' blood and sadness off of said customers' hands and put it back where it belongs: in the water--the 87,000 psi water, which kills a lobster via intense compression (probably in a less than instantaneous fashion) and blows the shell clean off its body, leaving the shiny, succulent, sterilized corpse to float to the surface.


yummy! and cruelty free! if it's true that lobsters can't feel pain, which would be the result of their not possessing anything that we might recognize as a brain. (this sensory deficit has been supported and contested a number of times by various entities, but i think it wise, or at least thoughtful, to err on the side of caution; it might do us well to remember that for many, many years, doctors believed newborns and infants weren't developed enough to feel pain, either, and surgery was routinely performed on very young children with minimal anesthesia.) of course, if lobsters do lack the sort of neural anatomy that would allow them to register being slowly and simultaneously crushed and blown up, are they really likely to suffer psychological trauma from being enclosed in a crowded, confined space? and if that isn't likely, why did whole foods bother to change anything about its practices at all?

well, because their customers are sensitive. and whole foods cares about its customers--especially their hands, with which they reach into their pockets and bags and withdraw their wallets. so when the chain decided to open a new store in maine, they asked the sensitive customers in that part of the country how they were feeling. and the customers said, "we feel like we want you to sell live lobsters, and it makes our hands tired when you tell us you aren't going to." and whole foods was disarmed by their openness and honesty, their willingness to make themselves vulnerable, and it relented: live lobsters will be sold in portland.

perhaps you, as i did at first, have leapt to the conclusion that the shot-callers at whole foods are a bunch of two-faced, money-grubbing ne'er-do-wells who will say anything to placate their sprout-loving, organic-hemp-draped base. but their commitment to compassion is as strong as ever: the lobsters will be housed in private rooms (the sort that were previously deemed insufficient), and each one sold will be killed via a 110-volt shock administered by an employee in the store, thus "spar[ing] them the agony of being boiled alive in a pot of water." the rest of the country is, apparently, not strong enough even for this method of lobster dispatch, which still forces the customer to be in the room while his or her meal is rendered lifeless. but up in the north country the natives are hewn from hardier stock, and if they want their lobsters to be electrocuted before their very eyes, well, by god, that's what they'll get, store policy or no.

listen, eat lobster, don't eat lobster, but choose a side and stand on it. i think there's something wrong with supporting an action one couldn't bear to participate in, and so i don't eat anything that i would have a problem killing with my own hands. my grandmother loved lobster but couldn't take hers apart by herself or eat while the lobster's head was "looking at her." this bothered me, so i taunted her with lobster-face puppet shows. i felt justified in forcing her to face her own contradictions. i think it's something everyone should do. maybe what whole foods ought to do is set up a tank like the tide pool exhibits at large aquariums, where children get to handle starfish and horseshoe crabs, and force customers to capture and stun their own crustaceans. it would be a fantastic back-to-nature experience for everyone, even the lobsters, and those who insist it's all right to eat shellfish because they're incapable of experiencing discomfort could prove that that opinion is more than just a security blanket. it wouldn't be the first time someone had made a sport of it. we claim to favor accountability in our politics and our business dealings, and members of our society have been known to praise, and occasionally engage in, acts motivated by sincerity and conscience. isn't it time, finally, for everyone--including and especially whole foods--to put their money where their salivating mouths are?






* my father and uncles also liked to place the liquored-up lobsters on the kitchen floor and encourage them to race and/or fight with one another or the family pets, as they had generally had more than a little to drink by then themselves. i do not miss the taste or smell of seafood, nor do i yearn for the summers of my childhood.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging

ahhh, boston's channel 7 news team, bringing you nonstories in the form of overhyped, heart-stopping high alerts for as long as anyone i know can remember. my first and fondest memory of their brand of committed pseudoreporting is the segment they ran in early 2000 on the dangers of automatic doors, in which an elderly woman using a walker was assaulted in slow motion by a thuggish, hands-free sliding panel again and again and again; i laughed, i cried, i hurled a pillow at the television so hard i almost threw my shoulder out. i never thought they'd top it, but, masters of the trade as they are, i should have known i was mad to doubt them. because my descriptive skills fall short of those needed to accurately portray their most recent triumph, i'm going to let the work speak for itself.

ryan schulteis, mike boudo--this thud's for you.

i am confused.

how does the resignation of the head of the cartoon network help anyone "move on" from the mooninite bomb-hysteria incident? didn't an entirely different company come up with the idea for the ads? wasn't the network absolved in the settlement proceedings? how is jim samples, who has served the network beautifully for thirteen years, at all responsible for any part of this fiasco? i'm looking at this and thinking turner had a bad day at work, so it went home and kicked the dog, which is sucko, 'cause it was a really good dog. why are corporate politics--or any and all politics, really--so ass-backwards and dependent on fall guys and buy-offs? bunk, i say. bunk right to the core.

friday celebrity-letter blogging

dear david lynch,

i had the same dream two nights in a row this week. when it starts out, i'm in the brookline trader joe's. i have a friend with me; he isn't human. he appears to be a cross between e.t., an ewok, and glomer from the punky brewster cartoon. he speaks very eloquent english, though, and i think he's older than me. anyway, we turn the corner of the last frozen-foods aisle expecting to find the produce section, but instead we walk into a large, offset wing that neither of us has ever seen before. it has hardwood floors and shelving with a dark finish, maybe red mahogany. it turns out that trader joe's has begun selling small pets, like gerbils and fish, and this section is where they're being housed. i decide to get a mouse and spend an interminable amount of time picking out toys and food and yummy yogurt-drop treats for it, and i wind up abandoning all of the food in my carriage in favor of my new pet and his paraphernalia. strangely, they don't sell enclosures or terrariums or anything of that nature, but i'm not concerned because i remember that i have a lovely habitrail at home. the trader joe's pet specialist tucks my mouse into a cardboard box, about 8"l x 6"w x 6"h. i am very happy, and i like to think the mouse is, too. my companion offers no clues as to his mood, but he is exceedingly polite and offers to carry the cedar shavings.

we arrive at a house, presumably my house. it seems very familiar, but i don't know if this is because it's a place i've actually been in before or not. it might be a place i saw in a movie. it's white and separated from the main street by a large, hilly lawn and a dirt road, in that order. a screened-in porch stretches across the entire front of the house, and there's only one other house in sight. it's to the left of mine, if you are facing mine, and is about a hundred yards away. it's summer and sunny. the street is silent aside from the sounds of my feet moving gravel and the leaves brushing against one another in the nearby maple trees. there's no driveway, but the dirt road is very wide, so we park in it on the side closest to the house. i guess i don't plan on staying long, because i leave the mouse and the bag holding his food and accessories on the ground next to the driver's-side door of the car and run indoors. my furry companion does not accompany me, choosing instead to stand with his hands/paws behind his back on the grass across the road from the house and stare fixedly at a dandelion. i go into a room toward the back of the house--i can't remember what i do once i'm in there, but, curiously, i do not go in with any intention of finding the habitrail--and as i'm coming out i see the neighbor's large pickup truck driving past through the front windows. my stomach knots; at this point in the dream i know that everything is about to start barreling downhill and i begin asking myself to wake up, but i never listen. dream me tries to take a deep breath as she runs out the front door, aware-that-we-are-dreaming me says, "please stop this now," and me me ignores all of us and lets the scene unfold, knowing exactly what we are all about to find.

the cardboard box is on its side in the road, open and dusty and torn on one end. e.t.-wok-er is still standing on his patch of grass, quiet and placid. the mouse is lying on his left side at the place where the road meets the grass in front of the house, gasping and paddling his tiny feet, his bruising and internal bleeding beginning to make him look bloated and distorted. i pick him up carefully and hold him in my hands, and then i freeze. he has tiny human eyes, and they are expressing a pain so intense that i can feel it radiating from his body up my arms and into my chest. from across the road, e.t.-wok-er says sedately, "i told him to run. he could have run away, but he didn't want to leave you. he loved you that much."

dream me can't move or blink or close her mouth. me me suggests calmly that i probably ought to find something heavy to finish the mouse off with. aware-that-we-are-dreaming me shrieks, "OH MY GOD WAKE UP WAKE UP WAKE UP!!!!!!"

and that time i listen. i sit up in bed, trembling and sweaty, and press both my hands over my face for about fifteen minutes, trying not to cry.

what do you think that means, mr. lynch? i figured if anyone would have a theory, it would be you. you've employed a lot of perturbing dream sequences in your work over the years. have you studied dream theory, or do you just go with your gut? i don't have or want a mouse, but i had one when i was a freshman in college. i stole him from the biology prep lab. he lived for a while, and then he died, just like anything else. i don't think he suffered, but it's hard to say. could i be experiencing residual guilt? i mean, i experience a lot of guilt. it could be about anything. i just wondered, you know, if you ever have odd, horrifying dreams that leave you distressed and heartbroken, and if you have any suggestions as to how to not have them anymore. would you recommend transcendental meditation? does incorporating your nightmares into your work hasten the exorcism? i'm really only asking because the last recurring dream i had appeared at varying intervals for about twelve years, and i couldn't handle that with this one. any advice you can give me would be tremendously appreciated.

your shaken fan,

juniper


p.s. i'll still watch inland empire if you don't have anything to say about this, so please don't worry or make something up. that won't help anyone.

p.p.s. is your coffee fairly traded?

the truth, with jokes

remember about a month ago when i wrote that endless, angry post about, well, about all kinds of stuff, but which was intended to be mostly about how steamed i was at everyone who had voted for bush in 2004 and who was now having a temper tantrum about bush having done everything he had promised to do in the campaign leading up to the 2004 election--and for the full term preceding it--since a modicum of common sense on their parts at the time could have spared millions of people a whole lot of suffering in the years to follow? well, wayne gladstone made it funny. thanks, wayne! perhaps the combination of glowering and pointing/laughing will be more effective than either on its own.

but you hurt our feelings!

so, it looks like menino and curtatone did decide to milk the "emotional distress" angle and have managed to squeeze turner broadcasting for about $1 million more than the response effort to quell the mooninite invasion actually cost the city and the surrounding areas of somerville and cambridge. greedy, greedy bostonians--it's people like you who are driving conservatives to stump for caps on damages for pain and suffering, and in this instance i might be persuaded to concur. sure, $1 million is no great loss for tbs and probably less than they would ultimately have paid to put an end to all this, and you've vowed to put the money to great use in our homeland security and transportation departments--but you demanded it because you were in a position to do so, not because it was your legitimate due. that isn't justice, it's bullying, and no one likes a bully. once the money was promised to you you agreed not to pursue legal action against the network or the ad agency, but you're still pressing those ridiculous charges against berdovsky and stevens, who were operating as agents of the network and the ad agency. how is that sensible? and will any percentage of your winnings go toward making it more difficult to attach a magnetic battery-operated device to the I-93 bridge? because as proud as you all are of the hub's coordinated ground operations, the real issue here is that these things were all over the place before anyone responsible for examining them knew of their existence, and all the mbta improvements you can pull out of your hat won't erase that fact from the public consciousness--particularly the consciousness of those interested in doing harm. these were blinking and flashing and you didn't see them; an actual bomb would probably call far less attention to itself. how much does expanding homeland security response capabilities really count for if we don't have any reliable preventive measures in place? and what exactly do you mean by "other important community initiatives," ms. coakley? because if any of this money funds measures not related to citywide safety, you'll have proven that you support a legal system that caters to well-represented and well-connected plaintiffs out for all they can get. at least, you'll have proven that you support such a system when you are the plaintiff. i have a friend in public defense who would be very, very disappointed in you.

at any rate, your vindictiveness in this matter is incredibly unbecoming--common and predictable, but unbecoming. and now you've hurt my feelings. i expect this wrong will be rectified in the issuance of my state tax refund.

monday punch-in-the-face blogging

i was angrier than usual for a significant stretch of time last week over the shameful, media-fueled misapplication of the term "hoax" and associated criminal charges, and it made me uncomfortable. i'm a placid individual by nature, and i'd much rather smile at something goofy than send a barrage of fuming e-mails off to city hall. but i believe in justice above all else, so i stayed angry until there was nothing more i could do, and now i'll just have to monitor the case for new developments. i am, as i mentioned, optimistic, since even the judge at the arraignment couldn't stop himself from asking the prosecutors if they were sure the charges they put forth were really something they wanted to pursue . . . but we'll see.

anyhow, i know i owe you a rant today, and i have a list of items that i plan to explore in detail: the second gold rush in recent history to threaten a significant portion of the brazilian rainforest with mass deforestation and mercury contamination; the slimy way in which the bush administration is attempting to distract us from iraq by reiterating, almost word for word and with the same dearth of evidence, its road-to-war rhetoric in opposition of iran; the incredibly late admission that the u.s. military has not come anywhere close to adequately training the iraqi military--a report that makes me batty largely because it got swept under the rug with such head-spinning, breakneck speed--coupled with reports that bush understated the number of troops he plans to send to baghdad by about fifty percent, even though the soldiers already on the ground in iraq have declared an increase in ground forces of any size will be a losing strategy if it isn't coupled with a dramatic increase in support from iraqi citizens, which no one in washington seems to think they should have to work to win . . .

ohhhh, so much to be angry about that i have not taken a second to unhunch my shoulders in days and days, and my body isn't wired for this kind of turmoil. i'm training it to bear the load, one extra pound at a time, because i want to play a part in every fight i say is worth fighting--but i can't go at it 24/7 just yet. i needed a reprieve.

and i got it. lesson of the week: nothing bolsters one's strength like a little jelly.



but first that jelly depletes one's strength by inducing a giggly, breathless languidness. i imagine i'll recover with great haste, but today my golden gloves are bedridden.

boston legal . . . ish.

if berdovsky and stevens are actually prosecuted for possession of a hoax device and disorderly conduct--the witch-hunty and specious charges they were held on bond for yesterday--i'm going to flip out like a ninja. michael rich, the attorney representing the two men, has a paypal account in place for clients; if you felt like it, you could donate some sympathy bucks and a note to compensate him for the time he's had to waste thus far refuting those charges. i'm not giving up hope that reason will prevail; since the boards were magnetic, their posting had zero physical impact on any of the structures they were mounted on, making the act of hanging them a lesser example of disorderly conduct than walking up and down the block taping "have you seen my cat?" fliers to telephone poles. and possession of a hoax device requires that a person knowingly place another person in fear of serious physical injury by suggesting that a harmless device is an "infernal machine"; how could they even attempt to prosecute these guys for such a charge in this case? all they knowingly engaged in was a sponsored ad campaign, which happened to involve batteries; if anyone's responsible for placing others in fear of bodily harm, it's the local media. crazy. crazy.

and while we're discussing state laws, seeing as how we've (for now, at least) legalized same-sex marriage and all, don't you thing it's about time we emended this section a smidge?

friday celebrity-letter blogging

dear punxsutawney phil,


this is the scariest picture i've ever seen. i can't imagine how fast and hard your little groundhog heart must have been pounding when these top-hat-clad lunatics grabbed you and forcibly removed you from your home so they could encircle you, leer at you, and then wave you around in the air while a crowd of strangers hollered and blinding flashes went off in your face. i'm sorry. i'm so, so sorry.

please forgive us (but if you can't, i understand),

joon

rage within the machine

i can not get over this aqua teen hullabaloo and how many local politicians are squeezing it for every penny it's worth in an attempt to puff up their case for squeezing turner broadcasting for every penny it's worth, and i've never been so ashamed to be a lifelong boston local. i thought moving to somerville was the best, most happy-making thing i'd ever done, but now somerville's mayor, joe curtatone, has climbed atop a soapbox all his very own to do his part in rousing the rabble. i find the level of public ire aimed at the network and the men who planted the ads perverse and somewhat baffling, and i would like to take this opportunity to express my heartfelt dismay and bewilderment at my homeland's eagerness to promote paranoia and irrational levels of fear and outrage. so here are some excerpts from mayor angry joe's announcements, and following those excerpts are my rebuttals.

Somerville’s Mayor Joe Curtatone has joined the growing chorus of city and state officials who want charges brought against those responsible for putting electrical devices under area bridges and overpasses.

Curtatone announced Wednesday night that Somerville is exploring both civil and criminal legal action against all of the parties responsible for putting suspicious electrical devices up. Curtatone said he will coordinate his actions with the City of Boston, the state Attorney General’s Office, and the Middlesex County District Attorney, but he did not rule out the possibility of the city taking unilateral legal action.

"These devices may not be explosive, but they’re far from harmless--they’ve done a lot of damage to local budgets and to the taxpayers of Somerville and other area communities," Curtatone said. "It doesn’t matter if they were discovered after three hours or three weeks. You can’t put circuit boards with battery power packs under bridges and overpasses without somebody eventually--and correctly--deciding that they’re potentially dangerous."

no, mayor angry joe, it was not correct for people to decide they were potentially dangerous. it would have been correct for people to wonder whether they might have been dangerous, and it would have been correct for a police team to quietly inspect one or two in order to decide whether or not they were dangerous, but it was shockingly far from correct for the city to be disabled from one end to the other because people had decided, without any exploration into the issue, that these things were probably dangerous. the devices didn't damage local budgets--insanely reactionary local officials did, and that only happened in boston. in new york, where things have actually been blown up, local officials employed reason and tact and concern for public mental health and dealt with the devices sanely. their budgets aren't ravaged, because they took the time to uncover the fact that the devices were, in fact, one hundred percent harmless.

Curtatone noted that the city would not only seek reimbursement for its costs but would work hard to impose criminal penalties or fines that would discourage similar stunts in the future. "In the current climate, we need to make sure that no one else decides that this is a cost-effective marketing strategy," Curtatone said.

no one is responsible for the disruption but you, menino, and whoever else was involved in revving up the sirens; if the city requires reimbursement for the costs of a disproportionately alarmist and massive bomb-squad scavenger hunt, it should come out of your pockets. let these poor guys out of jail already. they were hired to disperse promotional materials, which in and of themselves caused zero damage to the city or its public works. in the current climate, you have a responsibility to make sure you don't sound false alarms or needlessly terrify your constituents. we need to make sure no one else decides yours was a cost-effective defensive or investigative strategy.

"There may be a tendency on the part of some people to laugh this off because it was a marketing stunt designed to promote a cartoon show on cable television. But I guarantee that the taxpayers of Somerville and surrounding cities aren’t laughing--and neither are the commuters and the public safety professionals who had to cope with the consequences," Curtatone said.

i'm laughing. at least, i was, until you made me too angry to carry on with it. i get that you're mad, you're embarrassed, you feel as if you've been punk'd, and you want to focus the blame on someone else. but that's childish, and it's not the sort of behavior taxpayers and commuters like to see from their elected officials. we want our public safety officials to make us feel safe, and there's no worse way for them to fail us in that respect than to prove, as they did yesterday, that they don't know what they're looking for or at or how to manage us and our city when they come across something eye-catching. and the consequences, as i've mentioned, were of public safety professionals' actions, not those of a cartoon show or a cable network. their actions were harmless, as was proved by the lack of harm caused by identical actions all across the country. boston screwed up, and now it's time for it to 'fess up. you guys wicked flew off the handle. i know it, you know it, everybody knows it; own it.

According to the Boston Herald, Boston spent $1 million in overtime costs investigating the stunt and dealing with its aftermath.

As city and state attorneys laid groundwork for criminal charges and lawsuits, cops seized 27-year-old Arlington multimedia artist Peter Berdovsky, who posted film on his Web site boasting that he and friends planted the battery-wired devices, and Sean Stevens, 28, of Charlestown. Both were jailed overnight on charges of placing a hoax device and disorderly conduct.

these charges are obscene. these guys hung pictures on poles. if the pictures hadn't been battery wired, we'd be hailing them as underground art superstars. they'd be the commonwealth's christo and jeanne-claude. there was no hoax; the objects were what they were, and no one tried to portray them as otherwise until city officials became involved. in other, less excitable cities, police took one down, found out what it was, and called the television network. the network told them where the rest of the ads could be found, and people took them down--end of story. no disorder resulted, and none was called for. these men are not responsible for what went on yesterday. let them go. seriously. let them go.

"This is outrageous activity to get publicity for a failing show," said Menino, referring to the battery-operated light-up ads for the Cartoon Network’s "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," which sparked at least nine bomb scares in Boston, Cambridge and Somerville.

Menino promised to sue Turner Broadcasting Co., the Cartoon Network’s parent company, and criminally prosecute Berdovsky and anyone else responsible for the devices, and to petition the FCC to pull the network’s license.

"I am pleased by the prompt, professional and well-coordinated response of law enforcement at all levels to this series of discoveries, and relieved that none of the devices presents a danger to the public. The investigation is ongoing, but there is no reason for anyone to panic."

first, this show is anything but failing. it's one of the most popular shows the network has ever aired, and has been practically since it debuted about six years ago. second, the ads didn't spark bomb scares; the bomb squads who shut down traffic to take soil samples and detonate LED panels at sites where the ads were found sparked bomb scares, and that should never have happened. the lawsuits are rubbish, as i've already discussed, and the idea of getting the fcc involved is so outrageous that i'm practically licking the carpet, my jaw's dropped so far open. the fcc doesn't regulate the actions of television fans or any of the things that television network employees do in any arena outside of a national broadcast, and cable channels are by and large out of the fcc's jurisdiction. pull their license? because you didn't get their ads? and now, now, he understands that there's no reason to panic? get the fuck outta here.

Laura Crimaldi and Michele McPhee of the Boston Herald contributed to this report.

hats off to you, ladies. in your place, i could not have performed my journalistic duties so unemotionally as you have done. but really, i mean, you can tell me: how many times did the two of you almost choke on your coffee while collecting these quotes? spit-take city, right? it had to have been. it's o.k., you and i, we're not alone. honest.

listen, joe, tom--all over america, people are rolling their eyes at us, and you're only making it worse. this thing got botched in a big way, but it isn't too late for you to save face. say you overreacted out of a sincere and profound concern for your citizens, but you have realized your error and want to apologize to the public for causing unwarranted distress. say in the future you won't act so thoughtlessly, and let's all get on with our day. do not say berdovsky and stevens deserve to be in jail for threatening public welfare, because that's bollocks, and don't try to convince me that the city was damaged by a few dozen colored bulbs. it was damaged by your failure as leaders. don't continue to fail us by refusing to take responsibility. the city doesn't need to hear from politicians about this; be men.


update, 2/1/07, 2:49 PM: berdovsky and stevens have been released on bail, and mumbles is maybe beginning to blush a bit about having come down so hard on them, claiming now that the only culprits he has any real interest in are the board executives at turner broadcasting. but that's still crazy, and he's still not sorry, and i'm still pissed.

in a post-9/11 world

what does this look like to you? a lite-brite, right? or something that might be hung on a refrigerator in a house where an eight-year-old child lives? perhaps you recognize it as what it is--a depiction of a relatively (though, apparently, not universally) well-known cartoon character who will be making an appearance in a feature film that's coming out in march. but you have failed the "war on terror" rorschach, because anyone who appreciated the constant peril america is facing in these dangerous and troubling times would instantly recognize this object as a bomb and make numerous hysterical calls to authorities, who would react in an accordingly hysterical manner and deploy multiple bomb squads, halting traffic for hours and sending an entire city into a shrieking, swooning fit. or, alternatively, such a person would make a calm and informative call to authorities, expressing muted curiosity over the nature of the object, and authorities would react in an accordingly hysterical manner and deploy multiple bomb squads, halting traffic for hours and sending an entire city into a shrieking, swooning fit. at least, that's how we roll here in beantown.

i appreciate the need for swift measures to ensure public safety, and of course it's better to be safe than sorry when dealing with a mysterious, blinking box. but the way boston officials dealt with this situation created mass panic where there had been none and where there had been no need for any, and the fact that these innocuous circuit boards have been up and functioning all over the city for about three weeks isn't likely to quell anyone's fear about the ease with which a person could install a less harmless electronic device. the ad campaign has been running for weeks in nine other cities, and police in those places managed to cope with the situation with a minimum of shouting and foaming and public uproar. governor deval patrick, whom i was so proud of only a few short months ago, wants to prosecute the two men who, after being hired by a third-party ad agency, hung the boards, as well as turner broadcasting, the parent company of the cartoon network, for the full cost of the response effort, and i think that's ridiculous. if my son's friend leaves a plastic snake on my kitchen floor and i see it and lose my mind and throw my microwave at it, i don't get to sue that boy's parents for the cost of the appliance and the amount i'll have to pay someone to come in and fix the dent in the linoleum; that boy isn't responsible for my extreme overreaction. a non-crazy person would take a moment or two to assess the situation before calling in a swat team--even if that non-crazy person had once been bitten by a snake. what happened in this city yesterday was nonsensical and embarrassing, and turner broadcasting isn't to blame for it.

mayor menino, whom i've also stuck up for adamantly countless times in the past, says, "it is outrageous, in a post-9/11 world, that a company would use this type of marketing scheme." but what's really outrageous is that, knowing the emotional and psychological state of most americans, we still can't take the time, or simply don't have the means, to distinguish between a marketing scheme and a citywide act of terrorism before we initiate the kind of large-scale response that leaves a still-shaken populace soiling its misinformed drawers. there are plenty of people who deserve some disappointed glares, but i don't think any of them work for adult swim.

the two men currently being held on bond in the incident, peter berdovsky and sean stevens, are local multimedia artists who specialize in lighting effects and vj events. you can see photos of events they've worked on here, and you can tell mayor menino to take a deep breath and admit to some culpability in the madness here.