The funniest thing about this afternoon’s Mooninite-induced panic is that the billboards don’t actually look like bombs. Real bombs are hidden away inside innocuous-looking containers. The blinky lights and LEDs counting down to zero are artifacts of Hollywood dramas, a modern-day symbol of “bomb”, the cinematic equivalent of the shiny black sphere with a fuse sticking out that you see in cartoons.

The city of Boston was shut down today not because of devices that looked like bombs, but because of devices that looked like Hollywood fake representations of bombs.