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.

This morning before work I switched on the TV to learn the latest pirate news. And while I was eventually gratified, I had to spend a tedious five minutes sitting through a report, the thesis of which was essentially, “Holy shit, an ugly person can sing!” Over eight million hits on YouTube as of this evening confirm that, yes, people really are stupid enough to be surprised by this fairly simple and straightforward situation.

Here’s what happened: a woman named Susan Boyle showed up to sing on a UK television show called Britain’s Got Talent, which is apparently their equivalent of American Idol. I’ve never actually watched an episode of either show, but both involve unknowns performing and being either praised or ridiculed by an audience and a panel of judges, including someone named Simon Cowell. The fact that Simon Cowell has been name-dropped all over the place for years and I still don’t know who the hell he is leads me to believe that he should be the subject of a future installment of Codger Corner.

Anyway, up comes this woman (I’d embed the video here, but YouTube has disabled embedding on this particular clip for some reason), looking exactly like the sort of women who attend Protestant churches: ugly, frumpy, mid-forties, bad hair, bad floral dress and a pleasant, disarming smile. You probably wouldn’t spend any time checking out her ass, but you would expect her to have some of the best double-chocolate caramel yum bars at the Bible Study picnic. And she walks out on stage, subjecting herself to a huge crowd of vapid twits, most of whom have very pretty faces and very dull personalities. They all smirk at the ugly woman and Simon Cowell regards her with what can only be described as a shit-eating eyebrow lift. Then the woman starts to sing, and it turns out that she has a fantastic (and well-trained) voice.

And that’s the entire story. Oh, except for the fact that everyone is very fucking surprised. Why, exactly? I hate to sound like Tipper Gore, but is this somehow MTV’s fault?

OK, follow me on this one. Once upon a time, musical talent was judged by talent. Then the music video was invented, and along came MTV. MTV quickly realized that when you’re looking at the musicians on television, often over and over again on a loop, viewership was influenced not just by how much they liked listening to the musician’s music, but also by how much they liked looking at the musician. Result: three decades of progressively sexier performers. Is it too far a logic leap to suggest that modern viewers of shows like American Idol and Britain’s Got Talent have actually been brainwashed into believing that good music can only be made by pretty people?

Yeah, I know, that sounds incredibly fucking stupid. But it’s also stupid that Simon Cowell was actually shocked at Susan Boyle’s talent. You be the judge.

Remember on Monday, when I warned our college student readers that Mexico was going to be a dangerous place to spend Spring Break? The U.S. State Department is backing me up. This morning, MSNBC reported,

“The U.S. government says Mexico’s bloody drug war is a growing threat to tourists. Now, as college students start planning their spring breaks, the U.S. State Department has a new warning about traveling to Mexico.”

The article goes on to give gravity to the situation with some of the latest border town violence:

“In Mexican border cities in just the past week, a police chief quit after drug gangs started killing police officers, gunmen opened fire on a governor’s convoy, killing a bodyguard, and 10 people died in a 4-hour shootout involving grenades and bazookas.”

All of which is to say, not to belabor the point, that I was right. Now, I’m not trying to badmouth the Mexican people in general, who of course aren’t any better or worse than any other people (this isn’t the Lou Dobbs show, folks). I’m just saying, it’s getting ugly down there at the moment. That’s not stopping opportunistic travel agents from trying to keep the festivities going, of course. MSNBC also interviewed a travel agent who said,

“You have to make a distinction between the border incidents that are going on and the places like Playacar, Cancun, Cabo San Lucas and Puerto Vallarta, which are exceedingly safe.”

Fine. In that case, we’ve got things clearly demarcated. If you want to spend your Spring Break drinking and having loose sex, go to Cancun. If you want to put on a cape and/or luchador mask, and spend your holiday dodging bullets and beating up criminals, head down to Ciudad Juárez. Or, you know… there’s always Florida.

Attention all college students planning this year’s Spring Break: I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that, if you were planning on road-tripping down to Mexico for a week-long beach party laden with booze, cheap pharmaceuticals, and meaningless sex, this is probably the wrong year to do it, as Mexico is currently experiencing a severe crime wave and a subsequent break-down in law enforcement. But the good news is that if you’ve always dreamed of spending a week wearing a mask and cape and taking the law into your own hands, now’s your chance!

The epicenter of the new Mexican vigilantism appears to be Ciudad Juárez, right across the border from El Paso, Texas. According to Time magazine, Ciudad Juárez is, “Mexico’s deadliest city with 1,600 murders last year.” Time paints a grisly picture of a nation in chaos, where,

“The conviction rate in the thousands of murders and kidnappings afflicting the nation every year is estimated to be as low as 5%. Women and children are also increasingly among those killed by criminal gangs.”

A 5% conviction rate? That’s a figure right out of Batman Begins, and this is more or less the point. When a police force is so blatantly unable or unwilling to protect their citizens, the citizens are likely to get pissed off enough to do something about it. Enter the Juárez Citizens Command, or in Spanish, Comando Ciudadano por Juarez (CCJ), a sort of experiment in “organized vigilantism.” Last month The El Paso Times reported that:

“A group calling itself the Juárez Citizens Command is threatening to strike back against lawlessness that has gripped the city for more than a year by killing one criminal a day until order is restored.”

The El Paso Times quotes a press release put out by the CCJ in January, where they declared,

“Better the death of a bad person, than that bad person continue contaminating our region,”

and continued with the equally-grim:

“Our mission is to finish each 24 hours with the life of a criminal. The hour has come to stop this disorder in Juárez.”

This is all quite dark, and it only gets darker. Time cites a case earlier this month in Mexico City, in which a man shot and killed another man attempting a forced entry. Mexican tabloids ran photos of the burglar’s corpse with the headline, “Dead Rat,” and ran quotes of neighbors praising the shooter’s initiative.

This implies a couple of things. First off, that Mexico needs its own Batman. Second off, any applicants for the role of Batman are likely to get away with just about anything, including murder. I’m not suggesting you should do this, of course, because you will undoubtedly end up dead, dear reader. No, now that the vigilante gauntlet has been thrown down, I believe there is only one sure solution: roving bands of brightly-costumed, masked luchadores. Thousands of them, filling the streets, preventing robberies, and… wrestling. Think about it. It would rule.

A couple of days ago, Valentine’s Day happened, and The Beak ignored it. The closest we came was when Varius wrote the following on Twitter:

“Well, Valentine’s day is over, and we didn’t write about it. We win!”

And all was well. But now I suspect this is only because we didn’t have the right sort of news item to go with the topic. The sort of news item that takes a harmless occasion and turns it into something uncomfortable, like when an old man with whom you’re discussing the weather suddenly digresses into reminiscing about his lost ability to “get it up.” Or perhaps something like, say, a dating site created exclusively for people diagnosed with terminal illnesses. Freshly launched on February 14, 2009, get ready for Till-Death-Do-Us-Part.com.

On February 9, 2009, the following press release was sent to media outlets:

“Death connects us all. The quality of our lives is profoundly affected by how we choose to face it. How much time do you have left? How would you prefer to spend that time –and what kind of person would you like to spend it with? Let us help you find a singing partner for your swan song. Straight, gay or bi, find your perfect match — or matches. No guilt, no lies, no shame. Just a shared desire to go out with a ‘bang.’ Be a romantic or a horny dog till the end. Join us as we launch… if you are truly dying to connect.”

This has a lot of bizarre cultural implications, but we’ll get to that in a moment, because first I want to point out something that may be of interest to some of our more esoterically-minded readers. The T.D.D.U.P. website features an inspirational and/or humorous quote near the top of the splash, which changes upon refreshing the page. Keen-eyed Discordians who cycle through these quotes will notice that one comes from Robert Anton Wilson’s 2007 deathbed blog: “Please pardon my levity, I don’t see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd.” David Pescovitz of boingboing.net noted the same thing over the weekend. Whether this is a clue that the whole thing is some ghastly prank, a hint at the identities of the site’s creators, or just an indication that RAW’s influence is spreading, is not immediately clear.

Either way, the whole thing reminds me of a recent episode of House, M.D., in which Thirteen (who is diagnosed with Huntington’s Disease) briefly bonds with a patient when the team believes that she, too, is suffering from a terminal illness. (You may also remember this as the “hot lesbian sex scene” episode.) When House eventually solves the case and the patient is no longer on the verge of death, Thirteen loses all interest in her, explaining that she “feels alone,” surrounded by people who can’t relate to her condition as one who suffers from certain doom. I have no way of knowing if this new site for dying singles was inspired by the House episode, but it certainly does appear to take the idea to its logical conclusion.

So. Obviously, I’m not going to sign up for the site as an experiment to give you a more detailed insight into how it works, because even I’m not that much of a bastard. But we can take another look at that press release:

“Till-Death-Do-Us-Part.com is profoundly different from other dating sites. We’re dealing with people who know they are facing imminent death. They are aware that their days are numbered and they know, more or less, how long they have to live.”

Alright, whoa. I mean, fuck, think about how groundbreaking this is. On most dating websites, the best information you get regarding somebody’s likely fidelity is knowing whether someone is looking for short-term dating, long-term dating, marriage, or meaningless sex. But on T.D.D.U.P., if I’m interpreting it correctly, you literally get profiles like, “Hi, I’m Bill, I’m 49, and I’ll be dead in six months.” Holy fucking shit. But hell, if you’ve got to die, why die single? Everybody deserves to get laid now and then. Kudos.

According to a report in yesterday’s L.A. Times, Americans are producing less garbage, and landfill use has plummeted in recent months. And no, it’s not because of some New Age primitivist movement, or because of that guy who only eats what he kills in the park, or because anybody actually reads AdBusters. That would be stupid. It’s because of the recession, of course.

Still, it’s kind of cool. According to the article, landfills all across California are noticing some major breaks from the norm. The Puente Hills Landfill has experienced a 30% decrease in garbage in the last six months. San Francisco’s garbage generation is at a 30-year low; and San Diego landfills are experiencing a 15-year low. If this trend is consistent for the rest of the U.S. — and it should be, since the recession is certainly nationwide — that adds up to an impressive level of waste reduction.

Now, it’s fine to say you value anticonsumerism on principle, but the proof is in the trash can. If people can’t afford to buy lots of crap, then they don’t need to throw out all the packaging it comes in, and this puts a lovely, and long-overdue slowdown on our journey to WALL-E’s backyard.

And, while I’m ranting, let me just point out that it’s not necessarily a bad thing for shopoholics to get a kick in the ass every once in a while. There’s a reason my 80-year-old grandparents are more thrifty than my 50-year-old parents: they remember the last time we as a nation had to examine the meaning of the word “essential.”

At any rate, I’m going to classify the garbage reduction as a win for now, even if it is a sign that people are losing their jobs. They’ll find new jobs eventually, and in the meantime, we get a better shot at keeping our planet alive. And this is a nice accompaniment to the reduction in gasoline sales that reduced prices, and hopefully CO₂ emissions, in the latter half of 2008. Speaking from a purely ecological standpoint: is it just me, or does this recession kind of rule?