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.

We at the Beak are not role models. We drink to excess. We use coarse language in front of children and ladies. We “forget” to post for months at a time. And, perhaps most shameful of all, we smoke.

Like all smokers, we’d grown accustomed to paying more than we’d like for cigarettes. It was unpleasant, but you lived with it. Until a few months ago, when the President — himself engaged in an on-again off-again affair with tobacco — signed the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act. Mostly standard stuff, bigger warning labels and all that, with one nasty catch: it bans flavored tobacco products.

As a fan of fancy-flavored cigarettes, I was understandably alarmed. And not long after that, Horatio informed me that readers had been asking if we could post something about the situation. And why shouldn’t we? If I can build a robot at home, I can sure as hell figure out how to roll a cigarette. Luckily, I didn’t have to, since Horatio’s lady-friend (and all-around bon vivant) Ms. Monsterface has set up a blog dedicated to the making and smoking of your own homemade clove cigarettes. You can even follow along at home! It’s like a cooking show for your lungs!

I admit I haven’t tried any of her experiments yet, but only because I’ve been conducting my own. Unfortunately, I’m not able to write a guide as thorough as hers, simply because I forgot to take pictures of all the steps of the process. Also, I’ve already smoked most of my supplies, so that’s an issue as well. Luckily, I had a chance to talk with Ms. Monsterface a couple weeks ago, and gave her permission to steal my ideas. So for all I know, my clove-making techniques could be showing up on her blog at some point in the future.

And if they don’t, then I’ll just take some pictures and write about it here. This definitely seems like the sort of thing that could become a recurring feature; people love to learn indie-friendly ways to be unhealthy. In the meantime, though, we should all be grateful that Ms. Monsterface is on the job, bringing tastiness to the masses.

“I’m a woman, hear me scream!”

-Amelia, Girls Rock!

“I hate myself already, so high school doesn’t, like, degrade me that much.”

-Laura, Girls Rock!

Speaking of documentaries (which I was), here’s another one for you: Girls Rock!, which I finally got to see a few days ago. The movie takes viewers into Portland’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls, which is just as awesome as it sounds; girls ages 8-18 have a week to form bands with their fellow campers, take classes with actual lady-rockers, write a song, and perform it for an audience. Girls Rock! had the usual limited documentary release about a year ago, and I missed it. During the last year, though, I made everyone I know watch the trailer on YouTube, often more than once. Now it’s your turn:

You see why I was so anxious for the DVD?

Now that I’ve seen it, I can say that the film is far from perfect (although still quite good). The directors chose to focus on four campers, but we never quite get enough background on them. On top of that, the scenes of rehearsals and intra-band conflicts become repetitive, while the classroom scenes and the final concert are truncated. These issues could have easily crippled the film; luckily, the subject matter is interesting enough to make me forgive just about any directorial missteps.

Honestly, how could anyone hate a movie that features and eight-year-old who spends her time writing atonal dirges about her dog, and inventing new guitar chords with name like “Negative 10″? That’s Amelia, a.k.a. Am, an experimental visionary who happens to be a shy, thoughtful girl with a flower-shaped guitar. The directors also introduce us to Palace, a punk rock demon cleverly disguised as the world’s most angelic seven-year-old (she’s the one growling “Rock ‘n’ Roll!” at the beginning of the trailer). Seriously, she is so fucking punk rock it will make your eyes bleed. If you need proof, you can download her song “San Francisco Sucks Sometimes” and hear the magic for yourself.

In addition to these two, we also meet two teenage campers: Misty, a recovering drug addict, and Laura, who is — there’s no polite way to say this — a Korean-American death metal fan trapped in Oklahoma. Aside from offering a more mature perspective on the camp’s proceedings, they also provide a striking contrast with the younger girls. For all her shyness, Amelia can become quite chatty on camera, spinning theories about music and school and her dog Pippi; when she steps in front of a microphone, her inhibitions seem to vanish entirely. Laura, on the other hand, is talkative and social and genuinely funny at times, but will cheerfully admit to self-hatred when asked.

Much of the movie is dedicated to figuring out where and why this disconnect occurs. Scattered throughout the film are brief animated segments, which are really just a way to deliver statistics without resorting to captions or narration. Although I was ambivalent about the segments themselves (I found they broke up the flow of the movie, and took up running time that could have been better spent on the bands in concert), they provide answers to those questions, and raise several new, more difficult ones. What can girls do — indeed, what can anyone do — to get back in touch with the brilliantly uninhibited visionaries they were at age 8? There’s no obvious answer, but I suspect that the people in charge of Rock Camp are on the right track.

I could go on nitpicking, but I’d prefer to end on a positive note. Because for all its little flaws, this is still a movie about a fascinating subject. Without it, I probably wouldn’t even know that Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls existed, and I definitely wouldn’t have “San Francisco Sucks Sometimes” on my playlist. If they have to get a little preachy, or overstate a few points, fine. Those points — about society’s expectations of women, the numbing conformity of adolescence, the thrill of finding people like yourself — still need to be made, frequently and at a very high volume.

It also doesn’t hurt that the soundtrack kind of kicks ass.

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.

Ladies and gentlemen, today we present to you, a little man made out of bacon:

Bacon Man was created for an annual event in San Francisco called, and I’m not making this up, BaconFest. As you can tell from the above photo, he’s about three feet tall, and something of a marvel both in terms of catering and in terms of D.I.Y. weirdness.

Bacon Today, an all-bacon blog, interviewed Bacon Man’s creator, a woman calling herself NetDiva, to learn how Bacon Man was made:

“Bacon Man was made from around 80 bamboo skewers, 60 hot glue sticks and 8 pounds of bacon. The face was made from weaving raw bacon and then microwaving it in sheets. The rest of the construction was made by first building the frame out of skewers and then gluing on cooked and cooled bacon strips. We used a piece of styrofoam for the base and covered it in fabric.”

A similar Bacon Man was recently featured on supersizedmeals.com, with some photos of the building process. I have no idea whether or not the two Bacon Men are related, but one thing is certainly clear: I’m going to need one of these for my next house party.

There are a couple competing schools of thought (that is, wild guesses) about what an environmentally friendly future will look like. Some argue that we’ll have to give up most or all of our modern conveniences — no long-distance transportation, no mass communication, killing our own chickens, etc. This is unappealing for a lot of selfish reasons, but it would also be a disaster for the young nerds and freaks of the world. Just imagine being forced to live and die in the same crappy town you were born in, without even a Livejournal for solace! I give this hypothetical society a maximum of six months before religious whackjobs start taking over isolated towns.

The other model suggests we can continue our decadent Western ways, provided we make little changes to virtually every aspect of our daily lives. Most people feel they’ve done their part once they buy a few of those reusable canvas grocery bags. Those bags are what I’m here to talk about today.

To begin, for whom are these bags actually intended? Even if you’re shopping for one person, and walking to and from the store (as I do), your small basket of groceries will probably end up in four or five plastic bags. The reusable bags aren’t much bigger, and even if you pack everything in the most efficient manner possible, you’ll need at least two, and probably more. If you’re feeding a whole family, you’ll need a car to transport all the bags back and forth, which kind of defeats the purpose of being environmentally friendly.

Also, I don’t know how other stores do it, but when I buy groceries, the employees at the checkout begin bagging everything while I’m still fumbling for my wallet. By the time I say, “Hey, wait, I have one of your tiny fucking five-dollar tote bags!” everything’s already bagged in powder-blue plastic, and wouldn’t have fit in my stupid little bag to begin with. I’d understand this behavior, except that the entire checkout area is surrounded by racks full of reusable bags, and little signs telling me what a horrible person I am if I don’t buy them.

In time, I stumbled onto a solution to both problems. When I went to the store, I would bring my old backpack, which had more than enough room for a week’s groceries (except for especially large items, which I could always carry separately). Once I’d gathered my provisions, I would proceed to the self-service checkout lane, where I would be responsible for scanning and bagging everything myself. Once everything was scanned, I could place my purchases into my backpack and walk home. Foolproof, right?

No. No, it fucking wasn’t.

Having ignored the self-service lane for most of my grocery-buying life, I was unaware of its little quirks. For example, there is a tiny scale underneath the bagging station. After you scan an item, the machine begins beeping at you until you have placed it in a bag. If you ignore the beeping, the machine beeps louder, then stops, then scolds you, then publicly shames you by summoning a human employee, who needs to wave around an ID badge until the machine starts cooperating again. If you place something on the bagging station that you haven’t purchased — my backpack, for instance — the machine skips the first few steps, angrily announces, “Weight Error,” and calls an employee again. Probably the same person it called before, who has become visibly aggravated by this point.

I’m sure there are little tricks I could use to get around this. Placing my items directly on the scale and ignoring the bags altogether, for example. Pretending to bag my groceries before I actually bag them isn’t the most efficient system, though, and I’m sure the people in line behind me would have some complaints.

So what the hell’s up, local grocery chain? Do you want me using your plastic bags that badly? Sure, I managed to find a dumb, inefficient workaround, but there are a lot of really stupid people who shop at your stores, and who can’t even figure out how to slide their credit cards through the little reader thingy. What hope do they have?

I understand that a complete overhaul of our environmental practices will be difficult, but how does making it more difficult help anyone? Are you trying to prove some kind of point here, or do you just want to get as many plastic bags as possible into circulation before they officially fall out of favor? If you can turn this shallow gesture of conservation into such a pain in the ass, I’d hate to think what you’d do to me if I tried to actually start recycling.