Love is Like a Bomb

Right back atcha, little buddy.

A Lite-Brite. Well, not a Lite-Brite, but several Lite-Brites shut down the city of Boston and had residents in a panic for some dumbass marketing campaign? And it took the cops all day to figure out these were Lite-Brites? Lite-Brites with cartoon characters on them? And the Lite-Brites have been up for weeks and nobody noticed them until yesterday? I sure do feel safe now.

I know in the post-9/11 world I'm supposed to be hyper-vigilant and respond to these things seriously until they're proven false alarms but I just don't believe these threats are real. It's like when I was in high school and some punk-ass kid would call in a bomb threat. All of us would sit around in the parking lot for hours, listening to the radio in some senior's car while the volunteer fire department went through the school to make sure there wasn't a bomb, which even the teachers knew. Nobody would want to blow up my podunk high school. One punk-ass kid did throw a molotov cocktail into the library window once, but he didn't build it right and it didn't catch the library on fire as he hoped and he ended up serving time for his "funny stunt." Maybe it's because the local news media carries breaking news any time a backpack is left on a park bench for five minutes that I'm not sensitive to these bomb scares anymore.

Logically, I know I should have been worried about this yesterday. But I wasn't. I guess if they'd found one real bomb and then started finding things everywhere I would have been worried, but they didn't and I wasn't. When Universal Hub broke the news that it was some guerrilla marketing campaign, it made sense to me. The one good thing that will come from this complete and utter breakdown of human reason on both the part of the Boston cops and Cartoon Network is it will put the Boston bomb squad/anti-terror people/whomever's job it is to check for suspicious goings-on on notice that perhaps they weren't doing such a bang-up job (pun intended) in looking for suspicious equipment since these Lite-Brites were hanging from various bridges for weeks and nobody thought anything of it until yesterday.

And how stoked are the Lite-Brite people? I don't think I've talked about a Lite-Brite for years until yesterday and now I can't stop imagining all the fun I used to have with that thing.