They're creatives, they're REQUIRED to be obnoxious. However, I have to say good for them for not playing along.

Boston blew this thing waaaaay out of proportion and now the media is poised to do the exact same thing and they're not cooperating. These guys are post-modern media saavy, it's what they do for a living -- they're not gonna allow themselves to be Jon Benet Ramsey-fied by CNN.

They and their lawyer know that cooler heads will prevail in court. Their "performance" on the steps was not meant to win the hearts and minds of the public, it was meant to launch their careers. They're ad-world stars now.

I do think that there was a lot of overreacting here, but from the sounds of it, these things weren't _just_ lightboards, but did have some nontrivial resemblances to something like homemade bombs, with odd wires coming out of places & being held together with duct tape and things like that. So it's not that Bostonians were just collectively hallucinating the bomb-like look of these things. (And I have seen reports that apparently there had been some cases of fake pipe-bombs recently in Boston, though I hadn't heard anything about that before.) So, yes, we can think that Boston and the prosecutors are overdoing it somewhat, but let's also cut them some serious slack here as well. Keep in mind that the costs, both political and human, for ignoring a suspicious object that is a bomb _vastly_ outweigh the costs of not ignoring one that isn't.

I also find the kind of reasoning here -- "_of course_ the terrorists wouldn't make it look like _that_!" -- extremely problematic. If there really were a particular look of a device that should make no one think it's a bomb... then wouldn't that be _exactly_ the look that a terrorist would want to give their device? ("Hm, if we just hang these devices from the parts of the tunnel necessary for us to bring it all down, people will notice them and become suspicious." "Hey, I know, let's put a wacky cartoon character on the side, so people will think they are harmless!")

The media appearance by Messrs. Dumb and Dumber was like something I'd expect from an SNL skit... "Two A-holes at a Press Conference"

I'd have a whole lot more sympathy for the Boston officials if they'd done what they did, but, upon discovering what the things really were said, "Nothing dangerous here folks. Better safe than sorry though. See you next time." Instead, they had to work themselves into a righteous vengeance over something that didn't deserve it, going so far as to incarcerate two people for a "hoax." Nevermind that there's not a bit of evidence that anybody had the slightest intent to make Boston officials think something dangerous was afoot.