Oh, darn, I said I wasn't going to write anything else about the things unless something truly, spectacularly stooopid came out. But I can't help myself - swatting Brian McGrory around is like peanuts; once you start, you just can't stop. So here goes with a comparison of four local columns today:

Brian McGrory
Bad Hair Day in Boston.
C-
Some interesting tidbits about Berdovsky wound up wrapped in-between - and completely ruined by - McGrory's stupid nervious tick of starting pretty much every paragraph with "This was the column I was going to write this morning." Sorry you ran out of things to say two paragraphs from the end, Bri, but find a better way to pad out your column next time, mkay?

Howie Carr
Dude, like, send Borat packing
D-
I hope the folks at the Herald don't get too upset when I reveal here that Carr actually died five years ago - and that the paper is now using a Carr column generator. An editorial assistant fills in the subject's nationality and distinguishing characteristics, hits Submit and waits a couple seconds while the PC spits out a MadLibbian column just like Carr would have written before that unfortunate "accident." A pity Berdovsky isn't fat - there are just so many amusing synonyms the Carrbot has stored up for that. "Borat is a refugee all right - from a 'Beavis and Butthead' episode." Man, that's just Carr gold. But honestly, guys, any chance you could update your algorithms? The thing's starting to get stale.

Steve Bailey
Laughing to the bank
A
Wah! Why can't Steve Bailey be re-assigned to the Metro desk? His best columns are about the absurdities of life in the Hub of the Universe, anyway. This column simply and cleanly sums up the whole mess. And props for running the prominent photo of Ignignokt "displaying an obscene gesture."

Peter Gelzinis
Phony threat escalated real danger in hoax
B+
What's this? A columnist actually breaking news? Well, OK, technically, Gelzinis didn't break the story - Boston Police posted the pipe-bomb thing on their Web site - but give him credit for going after this angle rather than simply making cracks about Berdovsky's hair.

Dan Kennedy has some more thoughts.

I'm just jealous because nobody's paying me to write about a cartoon I'd never heard of four days ago.

You know what would really suit the mood right now? Yep! A recasting of apocalyptic '80s German pop. Spatch provides the lyrics:

Ninety-nine white vans arrive
All with TV crews inside
Everyone's a news reporter
Everyone's a Chet or Nat
Breathlessly they cause a panic
Are these bombs or just Satanic?
Suddenly the bloggers cry
"Wait a minute, those are Mooninites!"

And now, from all of us here at "Boston Held Hostage: Day 3," we say farewell and good night. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming (you know, annoying people on the T, coyotes running through the streets and Our Dumb Criminals), already in progress (at least, until even stoopider than you thought possible mooninite news emerges, oh, OK, go read Steve Bailey then come back).

Casey Ross reports Turner Broadcasting has hired O'Neill and Associates (you know, Thomas P. O'Neill III) to handle public relations. O'Neill also does PR for Bechtel/Parsons Brinckerhoff, yes, the people who gave us the Big Dig.

Oh, yeah, you're thinking, that'll help Turner's image in Boston a whole lot. But consider this: When's the last time you heard any talk of criminal action against Bechtel for Big Dig problems? See, O'Neill also handles government relations:

Our relationships run deep throughout Massachusetts, spanning legislators and leadership, committee chairs and committee staff, agency heads and administrators. With matters relating to the City of Boston and other municipalities in the Commonwealth, O'Neill and Associates consistently delivers results to our clients.

Get the picture? Wonder if Tommy O'Neill will be doing any pro-bono work for those two guys who actually put the things up?

John Cass, former president of the Boston chapter of the the American Marketing Association, says the LED ads have changed guerilla marketing:

... If you are going to run a guerrilla marketing campaign, it pays to think carefully about who is going to be affected by your campaign beyond the people you are targeting. I think the Turner Broadcasting/Aqua Teen Hunger signs are going to affect a lot of marketing campaigns across the country and give marketing people some pause in how they implement such campaigns and rightly so.

But that's not good enough for Eileen, who writes on Divine Comedy of Errors:

... Viral/guerrilla advertising is f-ing annoying. In general, people don't like the feeling of being tricked. Remember a few years ago when a mystery Santa was seen giving out money all around the state, and it turned out to be a promotion by WAAF and everyone was all disappointed and stuff? ...

Boston Police have released a chronology of yesterday's events, which occured as Washington and New York police were reporting suspicious (non-mooninite) activities and included New England Medical Center security officers reporting an apparent pipe bomb left by a guy who fled yelling "God is warning you that today is going to be a sad Day."

The NEMC incident happened around 1 p.m. A few minutes later, State Police reported multiple suspicious items at the Longfellow Bridge.

At this point we had multiple reports of possible improvised explosive devices of various types. As those devices were being investigated and rendered safe, detectives from the Boston Police Department and Massachusetts State Police were running down information on a cartoon character possibly associated with these devices, that later led to websites associated with that character and individuals placing these devices around the area.

Read the whole thing and you can begin to realize why the police didn't just go on TV and declare the whole thing a stupid ad stunt right away.

Jay Fitzgerald is getting fed up:

... The 'starving artists' are pulling out a 40-year-old Lennon-McCartney schtick of being flippant about, like, wow, everything, dude. Next it will be framed as a Police State vs. Oppressed Artists drama. The mere sight of them makes it tempting to overreact by shoving them on plane headed for Guantanamo. But ... but that's exactly what they'd want and so we shouldn't do it. Let's determine their motives first. If it was indeed misguided marketing, so be it. Let 'em go with a fine and free bar of soap. ...

OK, so now I'm watching Kate Merrill on Channel 4 whining:

It was probably the most useless and unusual press conference I have ever been to. ... Why they wasted everybody's talking about hair, we may never know the answer to that.

O RLY, Kate? So why did you stick around? Couldn't find anything original to report on? Maybe I should switch to AD GONE BAD on Channel 7.

Michael Gee fumes:

Their bad. Had the two simply committed another of the city's ever-increasing homicides, relatively few people would've given a damn. But give Tom Menino a chance to show off his cement head, by God, you're going to pay. ...

Auntie Scotch is set on edge watching Menino on national TV:

They way I see it, Tom is like a retarded younger brother - it's okay for ME to make fun of him, but if an outsider makes a crack I'm going to have to ask them to step outside.

Say, speaking of mayors, we haven't heard much from Joe Curtatone over in Somerville. We go now to Juniper Pearl, reporting live from Somerville:

Is it my imagination, or are the stories in the local media filled with especially juicy "I can't believe they said that!" quotes from your basic Area Men and Area Women? Mike Mennonno wins the prize (so far) for the best re-interpretation of one of these quotes.

The Herald reports:

The two devices found in an office at Tufts-New England Medical Center and attached to the Longfellow Bridge yesterday morning were not the marketing devices that sparked a daylong panic in Boston, but simulated pipe bombs, police officials said last night. ...

Via Carpundit, who knows many of the cops trying to secure all those devices yesterday:

... It seems the police really didn't know what they were up against. Call me crazy, but if I were on the bomb squad, I'd treat every device as an explosive until I knew it wasn't.

As much as he doesn't like the young'uns hating on Tom Menino and the police, our very own homegrown homeland-security consultant, David Stephenson, says authorities need to pay more attention to them:

... I'm struck by how clueless the authorities are about dealing with the kind of mobile networked "smart mobs" that are at the heart of my networked homeland security strategy -- and were clearly the target of this viral marketing strategy gone bad, bad, bad.

It now appears that some hip young bloggers were on to the story yesterday morning, blogged it -- but couldn't be bothered to drop a dime and call 911 (and, unlike NYC, if they had, they wouldn't have been able to attach cameraphone pix. In part that may be because they're conditioned to think that authorities don't really care about them. ...

A Google News search on "post-9/11 world" Boston around 12:30 p.m. brought up nearly 1,200 results: