OK, I want you to come up with a good name for a punk rock band...
... watcha got?
That's...erm...good. :}
Almost as good as the name chosen by a band in Florida.....but probably not quite as viral, or disruptive.
The band is called This Bike is a Pipe Bomb ....catchy huh?
The trouble is, fans are putting their stickers on their bikes, which is great till you park it at an airport.
Story here
Still, I don't suppose for a moment that the band suspected they may get any free publicity from their name choice.
Cynical? Moi?
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Addendum: The more I think about it, the more angry it makes me.
Particularly in relation to the story I blogged about earlier.
Security is the bane of all our lives, but these selfish arseholes thought it would be clever to generate publicity for themselves out of everybody else's inconvenience & fear.
Calling yourself 'This Bike is a Pipe Bomb' and making convenient long-thin stickers to go on bicycles was only ever going to result in one thing - security scares.
Pursue it, to its logical ending: After a few scares and the resulting free publicity, word begins to spread. More & more bikes turn up in public places. What do people charged with our security do? Divert resources to investigating what they, by now, know are harmless bikes? Leaving other avenues un-protected?
What happens if the whole thing does go viral? Kiddies swamp airports, stations, libraries, etc with the bikes, and then one day a real terrorist takes advantage of it and leaves a TBIAPB bike with a real bomb?
These little shits are not genius marketeers. They are just stupid semi-terrorists.
(Their music is ok though)
Comments
John Adams - author of 'Risk', a brilliant, counter-intuitive book - has long been searching for evidence of Western bike pipe-bombs can can't find any.
http://john-adams.co.uk/2009/01/16/bicycle-bombs-a-further-enquiry-and-a-new-theory/
I'm not condoning the pipe bomb sticker - or the band - but the threat is imagined, Yes, security guards are there to be vigilent but there's got to be some common sense from those guys, too.
Of course, the cyclists trying to get their bikes through security with these stickers are daft but full scale security alerts, closing airports? Puh-lease!
Are the band members 'sh+ts'? No. Sage marketeers, perhaps.
I'll go along with you part of the way. The threat is probably imagined - but the issue of the threat being real or not, is a sideshow.
The bottomline question is: Is it credible that a band choosing this name and creating bike-shaped stickers didn't anticipate the possible security implications?
Yes/no
Then we can discuss if they are shits or not.