NYC FailBomb "a Rube Goldberg contraption"

"I call this a Rube Goldberg contraption. It's the 'swing-the-arm-with-the-shoe-that-hits-the-ball-and-knocks-over-a-stick-that-knocks-something-off-a-shelf, and it is all supposed to work."—James M. Cavanaugh, quoted in the NYT, on the NYC FailBomb. Cavanaugh is a former bomb expert with the ATF who "investigated car bombs and tracked the Unabomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski, and Eric R. Rudolph, the bomber of abortion clinics and other sites."

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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Brillobreaks

Is it too early to laugh at the oversized neon yellow, blue and green children’s clock that was apparently supposed to set this thing off?
Anonymous

Maby the bomb went off as supposed to. A media-fear bomb to justify the uprising police state.
bjacques

The problem was that the the victim kept hitting the wrong note in “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms.”
Steven E. McDonald

My guess is that it’s one-part Mythbusters Hollywood Fireball Special (but no gasoline? Shame on him, makes a less impressive fireball) and one part reading precisely the wrong part of the Anarchist’s Cookbook. Even if it had, by some weird confluence of misfortunes, actually gone off, it would have produced a bit of a fireball, a bit of a bang, possibly killed anybody standing right next to it (mainly from bits of shrapnel), and blown out some windows. Oh, and left scorch marks. Given that the ones who discovered it and figured it out pretty much bolted clear of it and chased everybody else back….

On top of that, the twat also seems to have left the investigators with a couple of hundred clues. The way this has gone i wouldn’t be surprised if they announce before the trial that, oh yeah, they found his wallet on the dashboard.

What really amuses me is that the Pakistani Taliban is enthusiastically claiming FailBomber as their very own. This is EpicFail in and of itself….
Anonymous

The thing is, this is still being reported along the lines of “the bomb had the potential to obliterate all life on earth, if it had functioned as intended. Oh noes! Terror!”

Does that mean that if I jam 54 smoke detectors in a small cardboard box, with an egg-timer as an initiator, and write “Nukleer Bombe” with a sharpie on the outside, then I’ve just become the worlds 10th nuclear power?

Jon
- jackie31337
  
  No, you’d have to label is “nukular bom”.
GP

Maybe it’s a crude diversion. Meanwhile on the west coast…
sfazzios

I heard that his backup plan was to have the bomb detonate when a certain choreographed dance was performed on a series of treadmills.
Anonymous

Wasn’t Waco Jim the head negotiator at the ATF’s attack on the Branch Davidians down in Waco?
loonquawl

2006 two guys tried to bomb a train in Germany with propane bottles. The contraption was also massively flawed. Part of the defense later built on the question whether wieldings something that cannot, by design, explode, can actually be called a bomb. They were convicted nevertheless, because, paraphrasing: ‘Apart from the thing not actually being a bomb, it was a bomb, so fuck’em.’
Possibly educational endeavour for law students: Try and figure out where on the scale of ‘working bomb(shown because it exploded)’ to ‘thing that, to an untrained eye vaguely looks like a bomb, but made from the harmlessest of substances (say recyclable package-foam)’ the cut-off point for ‘bomb’ under the law is situated…
Anonymous

But Mouse Trap Never Works!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_0i5WqiIcc

(Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
Rich Keller

He could have used a See and Say. “The bomb goes…”
- AirPillo
  
  He could have used a See and Say. “The bomb goes…”
  
  “The bomb goes… *pop* *pop* *fizzle*…”
lasttide

lrn2google “how to make a bomb”. Some M80s, gasoline and Miracle-Gro doesn’t get the job done.

Oh, since all failed bombers get laughable nicknames (eg. underpants bomber), can this guy be the “epic fail bomber”? “Times Square bomber” sounds too serious.
- IronEdithKidd
  
  How about “Incendiary Failure”?
- SamSam
  
  I think just the “Fail Bomber” rolls off the tongue a little easier.
  - Anonymous
    
    Fail bomber is a bit ambiguos though. It could also be referring to the underpants bomber or the shoe bomber. It’s more of a class of bomber. I’m liking the contraption bomber for this guy.
Huldra

What seems odd is the perpetrator of this fiasco spent 5(?) months studying how to build this contraption. I offer the proposal this aspiring terrorist is a fall guy / dupe. He was never meant to succeed, he was set up. So he falls in the school of failed silly attempts, underpants, shoes, liquids, or pizza delivery. Somebody is spending lots of money and energy to sucker true believers to do something foolish. I am delighted his ploy for world destruction failed. What bothers me is the plot looks intentionally designed to fail. Are we missing something?
sprockety

Maybe he just saw the OkGo video.