Old Men in Funny Hats

It turned out the paranoids had been right all along. There really was a giant conspiracy driving and directing history for millennia. The old men in funny hats weren't as innocent as they looked.

But when, after much danger and excitement, we unraveled the conspiracy to its core, it was empty. The old men in funny hats were, above everything, old. And in the age of iPods and text messaging, kids these days just didn't have the patience. Attrition and heart disease had hollowed out the masterminds and left a shell flexing through pointless motions.

So we blew it up.

Clever Monkeys

The other day I read the prequel comic for the Transformers movie. It was not so impressive, on several levels, since it didn't cover or explain much of the stuff you'd expect from a prequel. Nothing in it added anything that I'm sure won't be covered by the movie.

But that wasn't what really irked me. No, the part that really irritated me was an almost throwaway line. There's an Obligatory Secret Government Agency, and said Obligatory Secret Government Agency is studying an alien piece of tech they've found. So one of the new guys looks at the pictures on the wall and wonders "Is that Robert Oppenheimer?" And then they go through a couple of other names, and one of the old hands says "How did you think we won the space race?" And in the end they give credit to almost all modern tech, from microwave ovens to digital watches to breakthroughs from studying the alien tech.

Yeah, I bet if we did find alien tech, even broken alien tech, it'd probably lead to a number of breakthroughs. Even if the aliens aren't super-duper advanced, their tech would probably have advanced along slightly different paths and so on. But the writer gave credit for pretty much all of modern society to this alien tech, and that just pisses me off. It's totally devaluing the cleverness and genius of the human race. It implies everything we've done is just from taking things apart and making monkey copies of somebody else's stuff, instead of developing and discovering things for ourselves. Some great respect for the abilities of humanity there, guys.

Come on, we can discover stuff on our own. We're clever monkeys.