Bomb Squad 64

April 14, 2006 6:13 AM

Teenage art students in Portage County, Ohio tried to create a public art project by placing life-size "question boxes" from Super Mario Bros. around town. The result? The bomb squad was called in, and for a few days authorities contemplated pressing charges against the teens. (via wigu)
posted by XQUZYPHYR (60 comments total)

The prosecutor said all of the girls will write letters of apology to each of the law enforcement agencies who responded to the suspicious packages.

I think the prosecutor should write letters of apology to the girls for stripping their freedoms in "this day and age" instead.
posted by banished at 6:23 AM on April 14, 2006

Well, I don't know what else to expect when for the last 4-5 years all we've been hearing is we need to be afraid of an "attack". Personally, a pretty cool idea but just not in today's environment.
posted by j.p. Hung at 6:23 AM on April 14, 2006

They should be prosecuted for thinking that might constitute good art that folks should be subjected to. They should get a $50 fine and have to pick up the garbage. Optionally, they should also have to promise not to be lame in the future.

As for the authorities overreaction, that's what small communities do when things are different. Obviously, if you were a terr'ist, you wouldn't orchestrate such a loud warning of your threat, and you wouldn't do something that gay even if you did. But authorities in small towns need excitement. If their lives don’t provide them this, they incite violence. Or something.
posted by Mayor Curley at 6:24 AM on April 14, 2006

9/11 changed every-




-body into fucking lunatics.
posted by wakko at 6:26 AM on April 14, 2006

What did the cops think? They were being targeted by The Riddler?
posted by papercake at 6:35 AM on April 14, 2006

yikes!
And the question boxes was a great idea. poor kids.
posted by dabitch at 6:36 AM on April 14, 2006

True, MC. Simple common sense. By the way, how many weeks ago did this happen, again?
posted by Jimbob at 6:41 AM on April 14, 2006

I disagree with the general sentiment here entirely. There are permits required for these sorts of "projects". If they had been obtained properly, there would be no uproar here.

Imagine the scenario if there were explosives or something hidden in these boxes, no matter how "Riddleresque" they seem. Which of you commenting here so far would be the first to excuse authorities when someone was injured or perhaps even killed by the question mark boxes? I can just imagine the outrage and the comments about how stupid they were not to recognize the threat.
posted by genefinder at 6:41 AM on April 14, 2006

The response was totally valid. Those blocks could have had flowers in them. Any random lunatic could have wound up with the ability to hurl fireballs.

And what about the leaf? You know the spontaneous generation of a racoon's tail and ears has to be using stem-cells somehow. That ain't cool, either.
posted by chudmonkey at 6:42 AM on April 14, 2006

And it if produced a Kuribo's Shoe? That town would be levelled within an hour.
posted by kafziel at 6:47 AM on April 14, 2006

Ok chudmonkey, you win this time.
posted by knave at 6:47 AM on April 14, 2006

Yeah, but think how incredibly, insanely popular those girls would have been if someone got lucky and found a 1-up mushroom?
posted by Malor at 6:48 AM on April 14, 2006

Have any terrorists, or any "insurgent terrorists" ever used something that you could see before it blew you up? It's always been a surprise - not something from fucking Batman. It's like being crazy fearful of squirrels and freaking out over mole mounds.
posted by notsnot at 6:49 AM on April 14, 2006

Imagine if it held a star, though. If that thing fell into the wrong hands... well, I wouldn't want to be anywhere nearby for at least 30 seconds!
posted by ludwig_van at 6:52 AM on April 14, 2006

In middle america where they still leave pies on the windowsill to cool and the children sell lemonade on the street corner in the summer to supplement their newspaper routes, brightly colored boxes in their 'Pleasentville' world was just too much. Perhaps they should just go back into their 1950's 'not gonna face the real world' lives and stay there.
As far as the commentary of the 'possibilities' of explosives or a 'terrust' attack; we've got the most incompetent presidential administration in U.S. history, backed up by the most incompetent national security apparatus, governed by the most corrupt and incompetent congress and senate, reported on by the laziest and pathetic journalists ever, face it, this country's an easy target times a million. If the 'terrusts' really wanted to get us, they could have done it long, long ago. Chicken Little ring any bells for anyone? The United States of Chicken Little. That's what the U.S. represents this day to the world.
posted by mk1gti at 6:53 AM on April 14, 2006

One of the guys I work with used to get all worried about any "suspicious package" stories. So I started offering him a bet where he bets $20, and I pay him $2,000 if it's a bomb.

I then bookmarked this page, and took about $500 off of him before he realized that he was going to go completely broke.

I should really find a way to offer that bet to the general public. I'd be a very rich man, very quickly.
posted by I Love Tacos at 7:09 AM on April 14, 2006

Time for Barney Fife to take that bullet out of his shirt pocket, "We have a situation here Andy."
posted by caddis at 7:10 AM on April 14, 2006

And they copied an old art project? Couldn't they have done something original?
posted by agregoli at 7:25 AM on April 14, 2006

What did the cops think? They were being targeted by The Riddler?

Perhaps they thought that if they bashed their heads on the underside of the boxes a mushroom cloud would come out.
posted by nthdegx at 7:29 AM on April 14, 2006

Well done, I Love Tacos. I wish I knew some paranoid fool I could pull that on. Just on the first page of Google News, I'm seeing "suspicious packages" that have turned out to be:
-a bookbag containing a metal box
-audio/visual equipment
-a smoke detector low on batteries
-unknown, but "harmless" (wallet-sized, wrapped in duct tape)
-a sack full of papers
-a bag of doughnuts and a thank-you note

How long before someone calls the cops because they've seen large, suspicious containers placed outside of every home in a neighborhood, and has to be informed that it's trash day?
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:34 AM on April 14, 2006

And they copied an old art project? Couldn't they have done something original?

What they did already demonstrates way more artistic initiative than you'll find in most teenagers.
posted by jjg at 7:42 AM on April 14, 2006

I'm frankly disappointed that, apparently, not one member of the police force recognized the things.
I mean, didn't any of those guys have an NES/SNES growing up? Sad...
posted by Thorzdad at 8:04 AM on April 14, 2006

nthdegx :Perhaps they thought that if they bashed their heads on the underside of the boxes a mushroom cloud would come out.
*bwahahaha* Extra life.
posted by dabitch at 8:11 AM on April 14, 2006

Al-Qaeda != The Joker
posted by dgaicun at 8:19 AM on April 14, 2006

Or what notsnot and papercake said. I'm original.
posted by dgaicun at 8:21 AM on April 14, 2006

Some people just love to get carried away in fear, anger and self-righteous displays.

I see this everywhere. People arresting innocent people for having innocent nude pictures of their children.. I don't dipute that bombing and child pornography are very, very bad things, I just think that common sense is a very, very important thing.

Maybe police don't deal with public art on a daily basis, but they do deal with teenagers, and they do deal with hysteria. If these people were seriously frightened, it's because they were dim, or looking for an excuse to get pissed off.

Why not be frightened about something real like climate change, or pollution? Simple, it's easier to worry about stuff that on some level you know is harmless.
posted by gesamtkunstwerk at 8:34 AM on April 14, 2006

They should be prosecuted for thinking that might constitute good art that folks should be subjected to. They should get a $50 fine and have to pick up the garbage. Optionally, they should also have to promise not to be lame in the future.

Anything fun is stupid; kids should only participate in activities that grouchy internet posters have reviewed and approved.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 8:38 AM on April 14, 2006

What they did already demonstrates way more artistic initiative than you'll find in most teenagers.


So I should be wowed then? Sorry, nope.
posted by agregoli at 8:49 AM on April 14, 2006

I keep finding myself terrified of my own backpack.
posted by Astro Zombie at 8:50 AM on April 14, 2006

/fark
posted by ZenMasterThis at 8:51 AM on April 14, 2006

The idea of a collaborative art project is more interesting once you think about it. Does public art have to be owned? Does it need to be original?

God love'em, but teenagers are seldom original. This is a much cuter fad than wearing pants below your ass.
posted by gesamtkunstwerk at 8:59 AM on April 14, 2006

I heard if you hit the wall behind one of those block 100 times, you can walk through the wall and go to a neverending water level.
posted by Falconetti at 9:02 AM on April 14, 2006

I want to know why the cops are wasting time with this when they could be working on that Amber Alert for the Princess! I mean, did they just try the first two castles and give up?
posted by robocop is bleeding at 9:05 AM on April 14, 2006

"We have a situation here Andy."

"It's big."
posted by quonsar at 9:13 AM on April 14, 2006

What they did already demonstrates way more artistic initiative than you'll find in most teenagers.

Or Mefites. Or me.
posted by furiousthought at 9:13 AM on April 14, 2006

What did the cops think? They were being targeted by The Riddler?

This is exactly the point. Comic-book villains hide things with gimicky wrapping-paper. Real-life villians just hide things.

This is like someone getting pulled off a plane for reading a novel with a stick of dynamite on the cover.

Real terrorists don't advertise, guys.

I'm frankly disappointed that, apparently, not one member of the police force recognized the things.
I mean, didn't any of those guys have an NES/SNES growing up? Sad...

In their defense, the Ravenna boxes kinda sucked. It would have taken me a bit of thought to recognize them.

What a ridiculous story, though.
posted by rafter at 9:58 AM on April 14, 2006

Yeah, those boxes do suck. And the fact that they're slung from trees doesn't help either. If they wanted to do this correct, they should have had the boxes floating in the air and randomly filled with coins and mushrooms.
posted by jefbla at 10:02 AM on April 14, 2006

There are permits required for these sorts of "projects". [...] Imagine the scenario if there were explosives or something hidden in these boxes

You are unamerican. You are a coward. I mean that 100% sincerely. I am not trolling. (Maybe, IHBT, but there certainly are enough real people who think like you.)

If you can not empathize with a teenage art project, then keep in mind that, unless you are a total boring asshat, something you do is believed to be suspicious by someone. Don't gloss over that sentence just because I'm being honest and mean: Something you do is suspicious to someone. They will call the police and the police will show up at your door. There are lots of laws on the book that are unenforced and nobody pays attention to, so if the police are in the right mood, they'll find something to charge you with. No one is immune to this. People are arrested and charged with stupid, petty things every day. We haven't had a terrorist attack for five years.

Please, go study up on one of the myriad of witchhunts throughout history and tell me that somehow you, your friends and your family are all immune.
posted by Skwirl at 10:05 AM on April 14, 2006

These guys were as dumb as a box of rocks, and if they found a box of rocks more intelligent than themselves they would take it out into a field and blow it up, just to make sure.
posted by caddis at 10:18 AM on April 14, 2006

Skwirl, it's not entirely his fault. Somehow the idea that terror is lurking everywhere has become instilled into well over half of the citizenry and turned us all into giant pussies. We still crash our cars and eat shitty food and don't exercise but somehow we're all convinced that it's terrorists we need to fear, and that they're lurking around every corner, and the only way to fight it is to call the feds everytime anyone else does anything and to beg the government to set up shop in our homes and business and make sure that we don't do anything bad, especially those awful foreigners even if they were born here.

Actually, no, it is entirely his fault. Genefinder and the rest of you: stop being cowards. Heart disease or going through your windshield are going to kill you, not Bad Guys.
posted by Optimus Chyme at 10:21 AM on April 14, 2006

What they did already demonstrates way more artistic initiative than you'll find in most teenagers Turner Prize winners.
posted by funambulist at 10:32 AM on April 14, 2006

Imagine if that backpack/briefcase/car/home had a bomb in it, and we did nothing! You only want to avoid midnight police raids if you have something to hide.
posted by dreamsign at 10:38 AM on April 14, 2006

I actually did this April 1st myself. I had seen the same website as the girls (as I suspect many others here have, the site made Boingboing and I wouldn't be surprised if it had been on Metafilter before), and I had to be on campus anyway to grade some tests (despite it being a Saturday), so the night before I spraypainted some cardboard boxes and put some crude "?" symbols on the side, took them in to campus in the morning and, at lunch break, strung them up with lots of tape and fishing line.

Despite it being Saturday, the police had found them down within twenty minutes. They had not traced them to me, but considering how quickly they were removed I'm still kinda bummed about the whole thing.
posted by JHarris at 11:09 AM on April 14, 2006

I don't blame the authorities for being cautious. They probably thought it was this guy.
posted by Durhey at 11:33 AM on April 14, 2006

You are unamerican. You are a coward. I mean that 100% sincerely. I am not trolling.

Well it is clear by your overheated rhetoric and across the board denunciation of a stranger based on one statement that you are more American than the rest of us. Seriously.
posted by Falconetti at 11:55 AM on April 14, 2006

"... we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."


posted by gigawhat? at 12:15 PM on April 14, 2006

Falconetti: Well it is clear by your overheated rhetoric and across the board denunciation of a stranger based on one statement that you are more American than the rest of us. Seriously.

Come on, the guy was seriously saying that it should be illegal for kids to leave out oddly painted boxes because paranoid people might think they had bombs inside. I'm sorry, but if you agree with that, you're a giant flaming coward and need to go hide away in some bunker far away from all my freedoms.
posted by Mitrovarr at 12:19 PM on April 14, 2006

Go back to graffiti, kids.
posted by sonofsamiam at 12:20 PM on April 14, 2006

I'm sorry, but if you agree with that, you're a giant flaming coward and need to go hide away in some bunker far away from all my freedoms.

I don't agree with it and think the Ravenna police are silly (and I know people that live in Ravenna). You prove my point, which is that it is so very "American" to condemn people with the harshest language based on the flimsiest of information. Maybe the guy that was being called a coward was a war hero, or maybe he ran into a burning building and saved a baby, or maybe he stood up for someone when no one else would. Or maybe he is a coward. I would prefer to disagree with someone on the merits of their argument, rather than immediately disparaging their character.
posted by Falconetti at 12:25 PM on April 14, 2006

Falconetti writes "I would prefer to disagree with someone on the merits of their argument, rather than immediately disparaging their character."

Why? Are you some kind of coward?
posted by mr_roboto at 12:36 PM on April 14, 2006

This is a little worse than overblown fear of being hit by a bus, falling concrete, animal attacks, or anything else that happens sporadically enough that you need to confront the fact that there are too many unknowns, and the odds for any one danger are hugely in your favour.

This is fear of anything different, unexplained, mysterious. And that makes me very, very sad.
posted by dreamsign at 12:43 PM on April 14, 2006

wasn't there some crazy guy a while back who taped open test tubes of water to telephone poles? now that was cool...
posted by troybob at 1:15 PM on April 14, 2006

If you try to scare the authorities, as opposed to this simple fun, then you very well might find yourself in trouble, and legitimately so.
posted by caddis at 1:19 PM on April 14, 2006

wasn't there some crazy guy a while back who taped open test tubes of water to telephone poles? now that was cool...

That happened in Milwaukee at least once, I'm not sure what became of him.
posted by drezdn at 2:56 PM on April 14, 2006

Personally, a pretty cool idea but just not in today's environment.

Seems to me today's environment is exactly when we need things like this most. People are being irrationally terrified of every little thing. Silly jokes like this may frighten people at first, because they're already in a mood to be frightened, but they'll also help them learn to relax and laugh.

And Mario block! In trees! Fun!
posted by moss at 3:17 PM on April 14, 2006

They ought to be fined for making such shitty boxes. Every one of those boxes in the linked page is about a million times better than those crappy spraypainted-newspaper-flopped-in-a-tree boxes. Nice thought though.
posted by puke & cry at 3:28 PM on April 14, 2006 [1 favorite]

Falconetti: I don't agree with it...

Well, I did say 'If you agree with that...' If you don't it doesn't apply to you.
posted by Mitrovarr at 4:21 PM on April 14, 2006

Ooh my first "via!" I feel so incredibly validated.
posted by wigu at 5:56 PM on April 14, 2006

I'd like to link to the picture of the actual boxes again and reiterate how much they DON'T look like what they're supposed to be.

If I saw those hanging from a tree, I'm not sure that my first reaction would necessarily be "OMG a bomb WTF call the cops!" but it sure as hell WOULDN'T be "Hey, power-up boxes from Super Mario Brothers! How delightful!"
posted by Ian A.T. at 10:07 PM on April 14, 2006

Sounds like they're not getting enough ketchup.

Ketchup has natural mellowing agents which keep you from flipping out whenever you see random boxes.
posted by Target Practice at 7:17 AM on April 15, 2006