This security business is serious stuff, but sometimes you just have to have a bit of a laugh. That was my reaction to the news on CNN that the city of Boston had rolled out its Homeland Security counter-terror team today.
The dangerous opponent? Turner Broadcasting's marketing department. The marketing department, it seems, had hung some lightboards around town featuring a cartoon character (the Mooninite from Adult Swim's Aqua Teen Hunger Force cartoon show) a few weeks ago in a number of U.S. cities. Apparently our highly trained counter-terror intelligence staff at the Boston PD decided that Mooninite = Jihadist and decided to send the department into turmoil for 12 hours as they negated the marketing threat and tracked down nine of the billboards in the city, believing they may have been bombs. (It's highly common that terrorists conceal bombs as advertisements for cartoons, I'm told, by sources who asked to remain very anonymous.)
Chalk that up as Homeland Security 1, Turner Broadcasting 0. Personally, I would have loved to have seen them destroy the lightboards. Talk about marketing "impact." But I'm still laughing, and come to think of it, that may mean the Mooninites have won their attack on Boston.
In case you're still confused what a Mooninite is, here's an image of the suspicious lightboards displaying a common Mooninite welcome (they greet others with a middle-finger gesture). That gesture from the Atari-like cartoon character might have been what really set off the Boston police this morning.
--Geoff
