Late yesterday, the FBI revealed that mailbox bomber Lucas Helder was planting pipe bombs in a pattern to show a happy face during his five-state weekend spree (click for map here).
Earlier than that, metafilter scooped another major story when user Kevin Skomsvold spotted the “message” 11 hours before the guy was even arrested. A story was featured in The Omaha World Herald but, they screwed up the relationship to Metafilter and attributed it to a chat room.
Yet another bit of evidence that independent news filtering can be faster and more acurate than “Big Brother and His Matrix of Media.” So much faster that Big Brother and his Brethren don’t even realize what happened or, what they are dealing with (ie: calling metafilter a chat room in the article). Of course we can be proud here as well, we’ve scooped The Brethren and even the venerable metafilter once or twice in the past.
All that aside… The very first thing that sprang into my mind was the scene from Fight Club, where they set fire to offices in a large building in the shape of a smiley face. Later on, someone also made the Fight Club connection. Cute, nice try… but, at least it’s not Hamas, PLO, or Al Queda driven. Just a stupid rip-off prank… it is too bad that people were hurt in the process. Another “center of the universe” dweller at work?