The more one turns to actual news websites these days, the more that actual news starts resembling The Onion. Here's a bizarre report from CNN about a situation in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Some dopey pranksters set up portable CD players with timers on them, hiding them beneath the pews of a local church. In the middle of Ash Wednesday services, the players kicked on, blaring nonstop profanity and sexually explicit language at high volume.
Yes, this was a stupid thing to do, a purely infantile prank. But was it necessary for the dang bomb-squad to turn up and blow up the CD players? I guess in a situation like that, people let panic take over. But if someone had actually wanted to blow up the church and everyone in it, you'd think they'd have just done that. Can't see the sense in ambushing a bunch of people with offensive recordings only to blow them up afterwords. Although it's not as if there's any sense present in this situation in the first place.
Oh jeez...
ReplyDeletearroo? I thought that it was the job of a bomb-squad person to identify a bomb and detonate it in a safe location iff it couldn't be defused. I mean I don't know much about bombs but it seems to me that a competent bomb-squad person would be able to tell whether a CD player was also a bomb or not.
ReplyDeleteAnd if they do just blow up every suspected bomb, just on the off chance, how do they know how much room to give it and how protected to be? I mean if you blow up something that contains explosive you run a pretty high chance of igniting that explosive, right? So unless you know just *how* explosive it is you don't know if it's enough to just stand 10 feet away before you blow it or if you need to bury it miles from anything in the middle of the desert first, right? And if you *do* know how much and what kind of explosive it contains then you also know if it doesn't contain explosive, in which case there's not reason to blow it up...
That whole bit just doesn't make sense.