Things learned:

1. Nigerians are more bestial than insectoid alien invaders.
2. All Earth governments are too dim to realize they could acquire a shit-ton of advanced alien technology in exchange for a shopping cart full of cat food. Nigerians may be subhuman monsters, but they’re brighter than everybody else on the planet.
3. Seriously, for a movie that was supposed to be about xenophobia, the portrayal of Nigerians was pretty shocking. Or maybe the movie was secretly in support of, or at least neutral toward, xenophobia?
4. Apartheid would’ve ended a lot sooner if Mandela and the ANC had cobbled together a few mechas.

At shortly after 6PM CST on a typical Thursday, one thousand men named Ted from all across the continental US are vaporized in bursts of energy. This energy shoots into the atmosphere, coalesces over the Midwest, and shoots down into the city of St. Louis.

The bolt of furious energy strikes Carl Mills in the chest. Mills, a recently downsized reporter, crumples under the blow, but soon staggers to his feet. In the next half hour, he realizes his head is full of the buzzing minds of the disintegrated men and that he has gained the knowledge, the abilities, and the combined strength of one thousand men named Ted!

Mills wanders the lonely highways of America righting wrongs, bringing closure to the lives cut short and trapped in his head, and seeking out the secret behind the Mysterious Origins of MegaTed!

Probably not, but I’ll ask anyway.

Let’s say that on one sunny day you’re strolling through a park’s secluded meadow with two standard-featured cell phones and a portable time twiddler. You’re bored and lazily digesting lunch, so of course you decide to perform a little temporal sociological experiment.

You adjust your holo-garbs to period-appropriate attire and twiddle time such that a typical middle-class urban male strolls seamlessly from the same park in 1909. You doff your hats at one another, the 1909-er not realizing he has been caught in a time bubble.

You walk up to the gentleman and show him your phones, explaining what they are. You hand him one, ask him to cross to the other side of the meadow, and then you ring him up. You then meet up again face-to-face and record his reaction. You retrieve the phone, bid the fellow good day, and twiddle him back to 1909.

You then perform the same experiment, only this time the subject is from 1859.

The guy from 1909 will have had some familiarity and experience with telephony, but he will only know it in its early, hardwired form. The 1859 guy will have no prior notions about transmission of sound at all, but he will also have no preconceptions about how such a thing might work.

Which of the two men would be more baffled, astounded, and amazed by cell phones?

I hates ‘em.

Plus I have a pimple in a…most delicate location.

Today is guaranteed to suck.

Sketchy Santas is a pretty cool site (and it doesn’t afraid of anything). There are too many pictures in which the “sketchiness” is evinced solely by the screaming children in Santa’s lap, not from the hobosity of St. Nick himself, but there are still plenty of amusingly sketchy old elves.

And then there’s this:

Isn’t that amazing?

It’s like the result of a Steam Age biosphere, a series of interconnected subterranean bunkers in which generations of pioneers have interbred in isolation since the 1850s. Almost entirely cut off from the surface world, they’ve received occasional crates packed with contemporary technology and semi-annual telegrams tersely describing advances in surface culture and society. They’ve seen terse descriptions of Santa but never a photo or Coke ad, so this is how they’ve interpreted the icon. Fascinating.