The day the mirth stood still

In case you missed it, traffic to this ATHF column from a link (which my friend Stephanie, who is awesome, posted) on FARK.com crashed register-pajaronian.com a little while ago. I somehow briefly wound up on the front page of FARK and scored 24,000 hits, which is more than the R-P normally gets in a month. Relive my glory here.


Remember the days when Boston was the nation's hotspot for godless liberals and unrepentant homosexuals? Boy, I sure do. Before Nancy Pelosi burst on the national scene with her infamous San Francisco Values (a FOX News term that refers to a preference for clean air and tolerance of people who aren't white Christians), Massachusetts was big stuff for being the only state in the union to allow gay marriage and generally known for its anti-Bush politics, large senators and damn fine clam chowder.

It goes without saying that all that's over after 1/31, or as I like to call it, the Mooninite Invasion. That was the tragic day when authorities in Boston noticed some blinking signs that had been posted in their fair city and lost their mother loving minds about it. Sure, now we know that the signs depicted characters from "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," a program from Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network and the subject of a forthcoming movie starring talking food. But how could officials have known that at the time they belatedly discovered the signs that it was all a joke? Aside from, you know, asking anyone under 35, since the show has an enormous youth following.

The ad campaign targeted 10 cities across America, including San Francisco and New York. It failed to cause a stir elsewhere, but Boston police made up for the national calm by immediately crying Al Qaida.

"Just a little over a mile away from the placement of the first device, a group of terrorists boarded airplanes and launched an attack on New York City," Boston police Commissioner Edward Davis told The Associated Press. "The city clearly did not overreact. Had we taken any other steps, we would have been endangering the public."

Funny how cops in New York, where terrorist attacks have actually happened, managed to maintain public order in the face of cartoon characters giving the finger. Conversely, the police response to blinking lights in the Boston area caused a mass panic and cost Massachusetts taxpayers something on the order of $1 million.

Overall, officials found some 36 signs around town. Though none of them were found to posses the capacity to injure a person, city bureaucrats have still done their best to tie the campaign to terrorism.

According to the AP, Massachusetts Assistant Attorney General John Grossman called the light boards "bomb-like" devices and said that, if they had been explosives, they could have damaged transportation infrastructure in the city. Later, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley noted that "(the sign I saw) had a very sinister appearance. It had a battery behind it, and wires."

You know another sinister device that has batteries and wires on it? My computer. It lets me write my column, but sometimes it does things I don't quite understand. Youth culture things. One time, it started saying things about "emo" music, which I took to be a terrorist code word, and I wrestled it to the ground to protect my loved ones. It can't actually hurt me, but the important thing is that I felt threatened, which means someone owes me a bunch of money. Another suspiciously wired device in my life is my alarm clock, which sometimes startles me out of a sound sleep with a loud noise. It makes my heart race and my head hurt, and I suddenly find myself filled with negative emotions. Of course, I trust Americans with this technology, but what if the Iranians somehow got their hands on it? Best just to indict everyone involved in its development, just in case.

Two men, 27-year-old Peter Berdovsky and Sean Stevens, 28, stand charged with disorderly conduct and felony placement of a hoax device in the Mooninite Invasion incident. Turner Broadcasting, Adult Swim's parent company, has also offered to pay the city of Boston $2 million to make up for the hysteria.

City officials are righteous with indignation and local kids are contemplating a move to Canada, but what nobody seems to care about is this: How in the hell did these guys place three dozen suspected explosive devices throughout the city of Boston without anybody noticing? If they were really terrorists, Beantown would look just like New Orleans right now. I'm absolutely against this whole Patriot Act thing, but seriously — shouldn't someone be paying attention to what folks are attaching to the left field wall of Fenway Park? Shouldn't the guys be getting medals for exposing critical flaws in national security? No, I take it back. Let's lock up the white suburbanites for promoting a cartoon. That will prove to the terrorists that America has the stomach for this fight.

Meanwhile, within the last week, every news source in the world has said the words "Adult Swim" and "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" and "upcoming movie" at least five times. A couple mil is going to seem like chump change by the time this thing sorts itself out. My prediction is that "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" has one of the biggest opening weekends in history, and I, for one, will be there. You might not think that talking fast food is a reasonable premise for a two-hour movie, but then, I didn't think a cartoon character could send a 21st century American city spiraling back into the McCarthy era. Looks like we've all had our horizons broadened this week.

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Meatwad make the money, see. Mfarley@register-pajaronian.com get the honeys, G. Drivin' in my car, livin' like a star. Ice on my fingers and my toes and I'm a Taurus.