Seven years ago today, I was minding my own business when I found a Beak, and blah blah blah. If you don’t know this story by now, I’ve told a version of it almost every year since this site’s inception, and there are only so many ways to say, “There was just a Beak sitting there by itself.”

This year, though, I actually have some good news for the annual State of the Beak address. Not about the website, mind you; that’s still unknown and infrequently updated, and I’m honestly starting to like it that way. No, the good news is about, well, everything else. For example, though I may have given up on my New Year’s resolution to complete and sell a comic book, I have managed to design a couple shirts, and to sell a few dozen of them for a small profit. It’s not enough to make a proper living or anything, but it is proof of concept — I could scale this up and turn it into a sonofabitchin’ business. I now spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about wholesalers and invoices and all the things that people much more important than me think about. I might even turn out to be good at this.

On top of that, I’ve been repainting (and thoroughly renovating parts of) my apartment, learning to prepare and roll clove cigarettes at home, and printing up a special order of shirts for International Blasphemy Day, which you can see to the right of this text.

That’s all been within the last couple of weeks. And yesterday I replaced the DVD drive in my computer.

Oh, and the fucking G20 Summit is happening in Pittsburgh (you know, where I live) right fucking now. Protesters were stomping through my neighborhood last night and applying seriously flawed methods to an otherwise good cause, which is my polite way of saying some windows got broken. I should head down there and make sure the dinosaur is okay.

In short, I have been busy doing things I didn’t plan for, even as interesting times unfold right outside my window. Also there is a dinosaur. That, my friends, is exactly the sort of life I’ve been trying to encourage (and achieve). I set aside this one day every year to reflect on how I’ve been doing — perhaps a bad idea in the current, genuinely scary political climate. But the horrors of modern life will still be there tomorrow, and I’ll still be outraged. Glenn Beck will still be lying, Congress will still be spineless, and all your favorite things will still suck.

I’ve got mere months left before I leave Pittsburgh, and for once I can say with absolute confidence that the state of the Beak is strong.

Last night marked the Beak’s 100th consecutive daily update. This is a big deal, considering our previous tradition of making 5-10 updates per year. Well, we’ve turned that the fuck around, and somehow become productive. There have been moments of genius and moments of absolute crap, as well as a number of posts that were okay content-wise, but were clearly written on slow news days. We even managed to convince a few people that we were internet-famous. All in all, a positive experience.

Horatio had been keeping track of this streak since it began back in September, and alerted me to this milestone shortly after I made last night’s post. Had I been keeping track, I would have lived in fear of the day this productivity came to an end, or even the day it experienced a brief pause. To be honest, I’m still living in fear of such a day. Lucky for everyone involved, I have a plan.

I hereby declare today to be the Beak’s winter vacation. For these 24 hours, we have no responsibility to follow the news or mock the stupid parts of our society. Tomorrow, we can pick up where we left off, and still treat the streak as unbroken. And there’s nothing anyone can do about it because I’m the editor and I said so.

Looking back over what I just wrote, I probably should’ve saved the vacation day for later in the month. Like Christmas or something. But I don’t really feel like rewriting this post. Fuck it, we’re workin’ on Christmas!

A little more than two months ago, I made a point to avoid watching MTV’s Video Music Awards. I had my reasons; MTV becomes less relevant every year, devotes undue attention to flavor-of-the-month mediocrity, and doesn’t fucking play music anymore. Worse than all of that, they’re now providing an outlet for acts once relegated to the Radio Disney gulag, confirming that, yes, pop music is for 8-year-olds.

In the days that followed the VMA broadcast, though, details of the event began seeping into the real news. Apparently, the host (noted entertainer Some Dude) had made some untoward remarks about the Jonas Brothers. Other performers had rushed to their defense, offering rebuttals that I’m sure were terribly witty in context. Numerous bloggers and commentators were up in arms about the implications of this whole affair. And I was forced to ask a very important question.

Who the fuck are the Jonas Brothers?

It is in the spirit of that noble inquiry, and all others like it, that I present our newest feature, Codger Corner, in which we will help our fellow geezers figure out what those damn kids are always talking about. Because by god, the world needs this. Not everyone likes watching E!, and even when you do watch it, those TV assholes just assume you know who they’re talking about.

My generation – and probably other generations, as well – is dealing with a hard truth: we are getting too old for this crap. The pop-culture universe keeps moving, and we’re struggling to keep up. When some amazing new band puts out a good album, we’ll be able to find it, but do we really have to pretend to care about Hannah Montana while we wait for that to happen? Hell, I thought Hannah Montana was a cartoon character until I saw those pictures of her dad expressing his boundary issues.

Thanks to us, you’ll never again need to worry about such nonsense. If one of these glorified birthday clowns starts doing something newsworthy, we’ll tell you who they are and give you some really mean shit to say about them the next time the subject comes up. You won’t just be informed; you’ll be the funny guy at the office! I mean, it would be nice if you could credit us, but we’re more interested in helping you. We’re like TMZ, except actually funny, and not written for an audience of semiliterate manicurists.

Oh, and the Jonas Brothers? According to Wikipedia, they’re a Disney Channel act made up of three actual brothers. All three are clean-living Evangelical homeschoolers who wear those fucking purity rings to advertise their dedication to waiting until marriage to have sex. If you need us to help you make fun of that, you are decidedly not part of our intended audience.

The Ridiculous Work of a Prophet:

Six years ago today, I found a Beak on the porch outside a University of Pittsburgh building, showed it to some friends (without actually touching the filthy thing, of course), and set off a slow-motion freakout that continues to this day.

Having declared myself Prophet of the Beak, I had unwittingly handed myself a list of responsibilities I didn’t fully understand, since most of them were quite silly and unnecessary. What the hell did a prophet — and an atheist prophet at that — actually do? I couldn’t see the future, and even if I could, that seemed like a needlessly literal interpretation of the job description. I couldn’t lead people out of slavery or oppression. My attempts to found a religion met with little success, though I stand by my claim that the religion itself was solid.

But I had already registered the domain name, so I stuck a blog on there and ignored it for months at a time. Recently, I cleaned up the HTML and made the page a bit prettier, and that motivated Horatio and me to post more (like, a lot more), but it still didn’t seem like the work of a prophet, even when you define prophet-work as broadly as I do. Indeed, I was beginning to regret bestowing that title on myself.

My friends were (and are) a nice mix of mystics and atheists, with plenty of gray in between, but I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with the mystic faction. If they believed in what they were doing in the woods (or wherever the hell people do that stuff), why were they so reluctant to talk about it. When I asked them how X worked, the reply was inevitably, “Well, X can’t really be explained.” If that was true, wouldn’t that imply it could still be explained badly? I was willing to settle for that. Prophets need to do their research.

But what do today’s mystics — the sort of people who fancy themselves prophets and take it seriously — really hope to achieve? They aren’t doing Harry Potter magic, and even the magic you read about in new age bookstores is mostly discussed in terms of metaphor. As the owner of a useless English degree, I like a good metaphor, but I didn’t want my spiritual well-being to hinge on my ability to talk myself into taking it literally.

All the trappings of mysticism — magic, meditation, and a whole range of rituals of varying craziness — are metaphors for perfectly mundane thought processes (relatively speaking; they’re still pretty weird, but there’s a boring, rational explanation for them). Just because I reject the metaphors doesn’t mean I have to reject the results. A ritual achieves nothing that simply sitting down and thinking about a problem won’t achieve just as nicely. The only difference is that most people regard their rituals as “special,” and as such assign undue importance to the topics addressed therein.

Saying you want something is just saying it. Praying about it is… also just saying it, but you’re making a bigger deal out of it. And that’s the only reason it works. People stick to their promises once they think God is involved.

If I didn’t believe in any of the available metaphors, what the hell did I believe in? Very little, it turns out, beyond a sense that humans possess a talent for thinking their way out of some really horrifying problems. And that’s more than enough to be a damn good atheist prophet.

You want some prophetic advice? How about this? You know all those problems that you ignore until you get the brilliant idea to ask the gods or spirits or tarot cards or whatever for help? Spend some time thinking about them in a totally non-mystical setting. Let them into your brain and leave them running as a background process while you go about your day. I have no idea how well that works, but I know it isn’t any less effective than eating Jesus-bread or tracing pentagrams in the air.

For all the people who have been wondering for the last six years, that’s it. That’s the mystical philosophy of the Order of the Beak. All the benefits of spiritual weirdness, with none of the dogma or discipline; “Know thyself” with a fresh coat of paint and (if I’m lucky) a fat price tag for any chumps who want further instruction.

It’s September 25, 2008, and the State of the Beak is strong.

This post is only here to pinpoint the moment, or at least the general time, that we launched the 2008 overhaul of The Beak. It’s basically the same, but a little bit prettier, and with way, way nicer HTML, all of which I wrote myself over the last 12 days. And it totally would have been validated, except that YouTube videos and assorted Flash doodads are frowned upon by the humorless HTML Gods.

But this isn’t about a totally unfair pantheon of glorified code monkeys in digital togas! It’s about how this website no longer hurts your eyes. You’re welcome.

Campaign 2008. A canned response for every occasion. Pundits manufacturing ridiculous scandals from thin air. Enough candidates to form a P-Funk cover band. And more than a year before it’s all over.

We at the Beak will probably end up endorsing whoever the Democratic Party nominates. But that doesn’t mean we can’t get pissed off at our own party. We can.

You see, there’s an unwritten law on the campaign trail which states that Democrats have to pretend they don’t have any good ideas in order to seem “serious” and “electable.” This is, for lack of a better term, fucking moronic. Bush’s approval rating is as low as it’s gonna get, and Americans are angry at Congress for their failure to lay the smack down on the Administration.

“What we need,” I mused to myself, “is a brutally honest candidate. This candidate wouldn’t have a hope in hell of winning, of course, but goddamn it would be awesome to watch him tell off reporters and call the other candidates on their bullshit.”

So we went out and found one, and thus was born Shadow Campaign 2008.

The Beak’s own Shadow Candidate will be along to cover this Presidential campaign, with a focus on cutting to the heart of each and every non-issue that gets trotted out to distract us. With any luck, he’ll bring a unique brand of Monday-morning quarterbackery to the proceedings, and probably find time to make fun of every single person on Fox News.

We’re getting an account set up for him as I type this. Once that’s taken care of, he can rain down satirical indignation on our hallowed electoral process, and hopefully be the sort of guy you wish you could vote for.