1/31/07: Never Forget

Jan. 31, 2007 began as a day like any other. In the City of Boston, adults went to work, children went to school, lovers fell in love, and haters stood at a respectable distance from each other. Then, on that clear, bright morning, the enemy struck—not terrorists, but that other enemy: entrepreneurs. These thugs and assassins, who mercilessly engage in self-described “guerilla advertising,” deliberately planted—in the coldest of blood—lighted devices around our fair city. Their plan? To forever change our way of life by inducing us to watch a certain television program, evilly titled “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.”

The perpetrators of this plot, who—much like Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri—have facial hair, calculatedly placed light boxes with sinister circuits of wires, batteries, duct tape, and a lighted cartoon character in strategic locations throughout the city. The danger posed by these devices is almost too terrible to contemplate: In the alternate universe where al-Qaeda terrorists hide bombs in Lite-Brite toys, these devices could have been lethal weapons of mass destruction. The evildoing entrepreneurs who hatched this plot, in wanting to force their way of life (or, at least, their product) upon all decent Bostonians, succeeded in making the city and its denizens look, well, stupid. Fiends! They must be smoked out.

Luckily, the Boston Police Department (BPD) unclothed the cartoonish mask of these devices to reveal their true nature as a hoax of a hoax of a wide-scale deliberate terrorist attack and responded accordingly. The first device was reported at 8:18 a.m. By 10:21 a.m., the BPD had blown up the box of lights with a water cannon (no radical laser was readily available) and determined that it was harmless. Over the next six hours, the BPD stomped around Boston shutting down highways, subways, waterways, and whatever sort of-ways the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority counts for the Silver Line, with more action-packed disorder than the first six hours of “24.” (Disappointingly, however, nobody at Turner Broadcasting System, the company that broadcasts the insidious television program in question, was brutally tortured by a rogue and totally awesome BPD officer.)

Although similar lights were found in ten other cities, nowhere else did the police spend nearly $750,000 to disrupt traffic and arrest two twenty-year-olds who would only respond to reporters’ questions having to do with human hair. The Portland, Ore. police department quietly removed the objects that they considered “harmless.” Apparently, unlike the BPD, Portland police aren’t drawn en masse toward bright shiny lights. (Or to college students having—gasp!—fun, for that matter. But we suppose terrorists, or reckless advertisers, could hide bombs in kegs at the Harvard-Yale tailgate if students weren’t required to wear pink bracelets.)

In the aftermath of the fake fake attacks, Jan. 31, 2007 will always be remembered as the most harrowing uneventful day in Boston’s history. And the day when masses of angry Bostonians grudgingly turned their televisions to “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.” They simply couldn’t resist such good marketing.