What with Paris Hilton's release earlier this week and the upcoming celebration of American Independence (sorry, Londonist!), we've been thinking a lot about freedom. Freedom to vote, freedom to choose, and most importantly, freedom to blog. Here are a few things we're happy we've been free to blog about this week. Being the nation's capital, DCist felt especially proud to let freedom ring this week by exposing the really important issues, like how sad they......

A bomb scare emptied out the Alewife T, a daycare, and a restaurant yesterday morning. David Toomey, a librarian at the Harvard College Library, lost it and said he had a bomb in his backpack. He said, "You might want to check the backpack." And, boy, did they ever! A daycare and a restaurant were also evacuated. Judging from transit police's comments at WHDH, the law went after Toomey's backpack: "We responded, we found......

We thought that all the movie trailer mashups we were going to see this year that had anything to do with Boston would feature Ignignokt and Err. Thankfully there's one out there making fun of Boston for being Beantown rather than our little bomb scare. The HeFarted might be immature in it's premise – but we'd argue that the fart joke is actually just timeless. Don't miss The Departed: The Fucking Short Version, after the......

Do they have to keep picking on us? Wired published a story today about new wave advertising. The lead paragraph made mention of the January 31 boondoggle by the Boston Police"These types of marketing tactics will not and should not be tolerated," vowed Boston Mayor Thomas Menino after the now-infamous blinking LED ads for the Cartoon Network's Aqua Teen Hunger Force were discovered on bridges and underpasses, leading to a bomb scare that shut down......

Botched in Boston seems on the fast track to a new defining statement of our city. Kerry started it with his botched joke that got tremendous play nationally. The Aqua Teen Hunger Force bomb scare brought it back as a botched marketing campaign, or at least a botched reaction to a marketing campaign. Dr Pepper has now ended their Hunt for More promotion – labeling it botched – and revealed the location of a......

The Graffiti Research Lab, or GRL, is a group "dedicated to outfitting graffiti artists with open source technologies for urban communication." They'd like you to know that they were not part of the Great Lite Brite Incident of 2007 yesterday. The company Turner Broadcasting hired for their marketing initiative, Interference, Inc ripped off ideas that the street artists at GRL had posted and used it for commerce – pretty much opposite the goal of GRL.......

September 17 terrorism comes to the Hub. The Boston Globe got hold of a memo outlining the plans for an upcoming terrorism drill to be conducted by federal officials and the City's office of homeland security. There is great value in staging drills, but there is a bit of complacency that comes along with knowing that a drill will happen. When the fire alarm goes off in the building it's a slow stroll out to......

Seattlest saw a house party get senselessly attacked with a shotgun and end in seven dead. A local senator is debated and their version of the big dig is investigated. To truly get to the bottom of it they interview the writer Jonathan Raban. Bostonist has its first birthday party and investigates how to attach more gambling dollars to the Red Sox. Benjamin Franklin is celebrated and Johnny Damon is not. Image by Ethan Bagley......