The struggling cellphone/PDA maker Palm has a new ad campaign for this holiday season: “Santa’s Gone Centro“:

Notice how Santa’s changed:

• Close cropped facial hair
• Skinny
• Aviator sunglasses
• Knows how to DJ
• Walks around town with an unconventional pet
• Pasty white complexion (okay, I guess that part hasn’t really changed)

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, Santa’s gone hipster. Looks like Palm didn’t get the message that Hipsterism is dead.

Still, I do give credit to Palm in that a Centro is a fine phone choice for a hipster who cares about irony in his choice of gadgets. If a hipster’s goal is to ironically appreciate things that mainstream society finds little worth in (the aforementioned Thundercats t-shirts from the thrift store, trucker hats, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer), then s/he would do well with a Centro. It runs on the hopelessly dated Palm OS platform, it lacks Wi-Fi, and worst of all, the touch screen requires a stylus to navigate. Remember the stylus? Didn’t think so.

So kudos to Palm for cornering the market that ironically appreciates mediocre smartphone hardware. But what I really want to know is, what kind of gifts does Hipster Santa (excuse me, “Claüs,” with an umlaut) give to the good little hipster boys and girls for Christmas?

Carousel image blatantly ripped off from Busted Tees. There’s a link. Merry X-Mas.

So last night I was randomly wikipedia-ing Craig Thompson (points if you know who he is), and when I saw his picture, I said, “Holy crap! He looks exactly like Sufjan Stevens (points if you know who he is)!”

The more I looked, the creepier the similarities became. Besides both having

• windswept hair the color of dew beaded raven down

and

• piercing, limpid green eyes that allow us to peer into their unfathomable souls

but they also were both

• born in Michigan

• born in 1975

• Fundamentalist Christians who had a crisis of faith that they explore through their art

• bittersweetly optimistic

• beloved of hipster females

It is bizarre! How could they have so much in common? Really, there was only one answer.

THEY ARE THE SAME PERSON.

It’s like Paul Dano’s “brother” characters in There Will Be Blood. Just as Paul Thomas Anderson used tricky casting to keep Oscar judges on their toes, the Brooklyn-based Jewish indie media conspiracy has done the same thing to keep the hipsters at bay so they don’t take over the universe as is their wont.

Speaking of Paul Dano, he and Wil Wheaton are the same person.