Malfunctioning fax machine prints out bomb ClipArt, forces evacuation of area - Engadget

In any normal town across America there are countless faxes sent and received which feature poorly chosen ClipArt: why then must a promotional fax like the one pictured above fail to print out correctly -- leaving only a picture of a bomb -- in the town of Ashland Massachusetts, not far from the recent high profile Boston bomb scares? This innocent fax caused the evacuation of a dozen nearby businesses after it was received at a Bank of America branch, coinciding with what police said was the delivery of a suspicious package by a customer. The package turned out to merely be "papers," and the fax turned out to be a promotion counting down to an explosion event called "Small Business Commitment Week." Maybe next time the company behind the fax will be a little more wary of the consequences of inappropriately using bomb imagery, and the staff that received the fax will stop to consider whether a potential bomber would use an off-center and badly stretched ClipArt image of a bomb to illustrate their intent.

One of the properties of conceptual blending is that it is opportunistic and individual. So, for instance, the author of a flyer with a bomb has no control over the circumstances which might override all the constrains on integrating the image with an actual real-world explosion rather than (idiomatically) an event that is 'the bomb'. This is a good example of how blending on the edges of codification and entrenchment requires negotiation (such as calling the originator of the fax or calling the troops). Of course, there are some contexts in which no amount of negotiation may be sufficient - resulting in practical taboos such as restrictions on mentioning bombs at airports (no matter how jokingly). Once a bomb is mentioned at an airport check-in, there is almost no way of successfully suppressing all the possibilities of blending with a real threat at least in the minds of some passengers.