Boston authorities courageously protect citizens from deadly light brights.

Congratulations are in order for Boston PD, bravo gentlemen for your courageous misinterpretation of a pop culture reference as a terrorism plot.

Also, kudos to the media for such gems as "It appears to be a spongebob character flipping the bird" and "The packages are consistent with IEDs". So apperantly now anything with batteries and LEDs are considered suspect as explosives. Don't leave your cellphone on the bus kids, or they'll blast it with a fucking water cannon. It's a circuit board, it has no payload, if it was a bomb it wouldn't even scratch paint off that bridge.

Seriously CNN, you are part of Turner broadcasting and you can't recognize a mooninite? Running low on competent interns?

As a practical matter, these things (from the looks of it) have been placed in ten cities for THREE WEEKS before you even managed to hilariously overreact to them. If they actually were bombs, we'd already be watching tributes to the victims and plotting revenge attacks against Iran by now. I'd already be able to buy cheesy commemorative plates and shit. Go go Boston PD!

Think about this for a second, 9 other cities have the same devices, so either their security is even more lax, or more likely they didn't go crazy over a bunch of novelty items.

Newscasters keep insisting that 9/11 changed everything when covering this story, and I'm starting to believe the line. We're living in a different world now, a world full of people that seem to be getting dumber by the day. That's the only change I see.