Attack of the Mooninites

UP YOURS, BOSTON!! There really isn't much to say about this story--a cheap marketing gimmick, which involved placing cheap-ass LED displays throughout a number of US cities, turned into a terror-panic in Boston yesterday. The displays showed the outline of the green character on the left giving the finger to the police, the bomb squads and anyone else who paid any attention to them. More than anything else, the "devices" (variously called "suspicious packages" and "hoax devices" on the cable news drones) resembled a Lite Brite game from the '70's. Never having had a Lite Brite myself, I could only look at them with awe and wonder and envy. And now, despite the devices having been put up in Austin as well, I had to look on jealously as Boston went CODE RED--why couldn't our emergency response people over-react too! It's just not fair.

Here's a link to a blog that includes a YouTube video of the perpetrators, I mean, terrorists, I mean, marketers putting up the suspiciously silly devices:

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/brainiac/2007/01/attack_of_the_m.html

Oh, and one more thing--as you can tell from the above picture, the characters in this cartoon have a tendency to flip people off. In fact, the Lite-Brite Marketing Bombs are all flipping off the viewer. Consistently, the networks fuzzed out the portion of the picture with the extended middle finger. For instance, I just pulled this from Fox's news site--note the fuzzed out portion of the photo where the middle finger would be: