The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Anne:

It's not precisely enjoyable to read these, but I do feel less alone. I'll share, too:

My parents are very smart, funny, and loving, but once you've had one parent attempt suicide and had to talk another one out of it, multiple times, nothing can make up for it. My mother, manic, unable to sleep for days on end, snarling at my father, throwing things. He sat quietly and took it, read the paper, tried to deal with chronic pain, lost job after job until it was too much. My mother, depressed, laying in bed with pill bottles in the nightstand and a handle of vodka under the bed. I kept telling her it was okay, whatever she needed to sleep, to relax, to distract herself from thinking about her own childhood. My little brother practically lived on the computer, and every Sunday night when I went back to school, I was glad to leave, scared to leave, and guilty for being glad. But he's out of the house now, too, and my parents are sloooowly getting it together. I'm afraid to believe it, in case it collapses.

But is it any wonder I stayed in a dysfunctional relationship for four years, with a man much older than I was, who went to work every day, paid his bills, and mowed his lawn? We screamed at each other over nothing, I started having panic attacks, he punched the floor when he was angry, but 75% of the time, he was all calm dependability and I needed that. I see now how nuts that relationship was, though, and I'm going relationship-free until I find a good therapist.

But I still talk to my parents every night, about books or movies or whatever. I guess I'd rather have that than have parents who went to work every day but didn't give a damn. I guess.

#66 ::: Greg London ::: (view all by) ::: February 05, 2007, 11:25 PM:
It sounds to me like the $1 million figure is a product of the lawyers negotiating....

Anne, if that's true, then it simply reflects WORSE on Boston government. They basically blackmailed Turner into paying two million dollars for Boston's overreaction. If it didn't cost two million dollars why is Turner paying two million dollars not ringing up in anyone's mind as anything other than polictical "grease"? Dirty money? Slimey politics?
Lemme tell ya something, "we won't press charges if you pay our expenses" followed by an insanely inflated list of expenses is CORRUPT.
So, EITHER Boston REALLY DID blow two million dollars overreacting to a false alarm, OR the Mayor is essentially blackmailing Turner not because Turner did anything wrong, but because Turner has deep pockets and the mayor saw an opportunity to cash in.
Those are the ONLY two possibilities.
Overreaction or political opportunistic blackmail.

I don't care which one it is. Both prove bad government.

I agree with everything you say here -- I think the overreaction and badness is on the part of the politicos after the fact. I absolutely think it's sleazy that Boston made Turner pay that much -- what HAS to be a fake number -- and I'm surprised in a way that Turner paid it. (I guess it's good that there's more money in city coffers so that money doesn't get taken from necessary services, but still.) My quibble is with saying that the police or bomb squad overreacted by halting traffic for a few hours while they tried to figure out what was going on.


#74 ...this was a problem of their own making, caused by having amped up the fear in the first place. They chose to go public with this right away before they knew anything.

Contrast this with the fake pipe bombs which didn't merit a mention in the news until the next day.

I don't think either of these claims is right. First of all, they stopped traffic at the site of the first device. That's totally reasonable, seems to me. Once they've stopped traffic, there is a traffic change, delays, etc that merit reporting on, on the morning commute shows. It's not like they have the option to keep the traffic flow a secret. So they say to the radio stations "We've stopped traffic at this location because we have a weird device. The bomb squad is taking care of it. We'll let you know more soon. Commuters should detour around this location." And the radio stations put this out and start talking about what the device might be. Radio stations monitor police radio, and their helicopter or whatever would see that the bomb squad truck is at this location, and listeners will call in to say "hey the bomb squad is outside my house, do you know what the hell is going on?" So I don't think the police have the option to say nothing.

And the two pipe bombs were mentioned in news reports alongside discussion of the signs, by 2:00 on the day of the incidents. The news reports (eg CNN internet) said that they seemed to be a separate thing from the signs... so already this is the word they were getting from police. Also, already the headline at 2:00 was along the lines of "Unidentified devices snarl traffic", with the story reporting that the police knew the devices didn't contain any explosives.

I really think the overreaction here was after-the-fact from politicans, lawyers, and media -- not from the police/bomb squad response.


#77 (Local police make 100K a year easily; living around here is expensive. With OT, a cop can clear over 200K/year.)

Wow - I'm surprised by the numbers. On the Boston police application (googleable) they say the starting salary is $45K, that's what I was basing my numbers on. And yeah, I was figuring on not as many high-paid bomb squad members, and lots of low-paid transit employees and cops working traffic control duty rather than hazard duty.

#47: a million bucks on a false alarm?

I agree but I'd be interested to hear where those numbers come from. It sounds to me like the $1 million figure is a product of the lawyers negotiating (with a mind to make Turner settle by thrownig around bigger numbers even than that), not a real accounting number. By the time Menino's initial $500,000 number came out, we were already to the threats and recriminations phase, so he had every incentive to emphasize the Seriousness of the Crime by inflating the number.

(Let's do some math with fake numbers. How many hours are involved? Say 8am - 5pm, so averaging 9 hours. How many city workers needing to be paid overtime - say around 1000? How much is their overtime - maybe say an average of $30/hour? That would give us $270,000 in overtime.)

#37: I definitely think the whole thing is silly, and I'm not at all saying "the politicians acted honorably all the way, a pox on the nasty nasty media". I'm just saying that the police response considered in isolation is not necessarily an overreaction. The politicians then get in on the act, needing to look tough and like there's nothing false about a false alarm, and the whole thing is made bigger by, as #39 Ursula says, national media flapping a local story into national hem-and-haw fodder. All I meant is that "overreaction" more accurately describes the rhetoric being used by officials and press, not the actions of the emergency teams.

I'm guessing the timeline is this:

8 AM weird device reported on bridge; road closed, traffic snarls, reports go out on radio

10 AM bomb squad shows up, examines it, pretty sure it's not a bomb but to play it safe they destroy it. By this time, radio has been talking about it for a couple hours.

10 - 12 Word starts gets back to city hall, and thereby to radio, that it's not a bomb, but radio continues to mention it in recaps of the news of the morning and traffic reports. Police + city proceed, thinking it's an isolated unidentifiable weird device, not a bomb but still noteworthy. Dealing with logistics of reopening roadways; everyone in town now primed to keep eyes peeled for weird things on bridges.

12 Four phone calls (from cautious citizens, from funny citizens in the know about ATHF, from sleazy Interference Inc?) reporting more mystery devices on bridges etc around town. Police now think, pretty reasonably, what the hell is going on? We don't know what these things are. The bomb squad said they weren't bombs, but it's awful weird for unidentifiable electronics to pop up on important infrastructure all over town, overnight (so far as we know now). Maybe they're just detonators, or relay points for a detonation signal, or something else -- we don't know what they are, and they're all over the place in places where they could really do harm. We'd better treat this as the real deal, while trying to figure out what the hell they are.

1 Two apparent pipe bombs found (to the person upthread who finds that too convenient: these were being reported on internet news sources at 2:00 Wednesday, which is when I started following the story).

2:30 Police analyst figures out what the ATHF signs are, and police realize it's not an attack.


If this is right, the police response actually seems to me like a reasonable approach. The unreasonable part comes from the radio and TV chatterers pumping it up, so the city then feels the need to bluster about, and find a fall guy for, the inconvenience caused by its totally reasonable cautious response.

If using words derived from Arabic is in itself suspicious, then I have to cast a baleful glance towards the institutions of Homeland Security themselves, which currently have us on orange alert.

I tend to use my almanac to find such sensitive information as zip codes and election returns, so I'm skeptical of the great threat it poses. On the other hand, were I ever to plan a Topkapi-style cat burglary of a major European museum, the first thing I'd want would be a Dorling-Kindersley Eyewitness Travel Guide. I commonly refer to it as the "Junior Woodchuck Manual."

On the other hand, weren't the anthrax letters of late 2001 were tied together because the return address had an incorrect zip code?

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