So I was reading the billionth article on Glenn Beck’s dumbass claim that Obama hates white people and “white culture,” and I began to wonder what the fuck he actually meant by “white culture” anyway.  It can, after all, mean two very different things.  While trying to come up with a joke to that effect, I thought about how that joke would look as a line in a blog post.  Probably something like this:

Hopefully, Beck was talking about this and not this.

And here’s my real point: you probably didn’t click those links. You just moused over them, glanced at the bottom of the screen to see where they went, and immediately understood the joke after you saw the Wikipedia URL’s.

In other words, Wikipedia links have become a type of comedic shorthand.  Everyone knows how to read a Wikipedia URL, so they just mouse over the link, spot the reference, and get on with reading the rest of the post.  Indeed, if they did click both links, that would actually be bad for the original post — aside from screwing up the pacing, the reader would end up confused when they clicked over to the next tab and found an entry on Barry Manilow. “Why the hell am I looking at this?” the reader would ask. “What link was that? Ah well, guess I missed out on that joke.”

Weirder still, when I wrote that line, I wasn’t thinking about any of this. I didn’t say to myself, “Well, they’ll check where the links go, and then move on.” I put the links in because, shit, that’s just how I’ve always done it. Many, many other people on the internet do the same thing. And chances are, most of them are doing it without being fully aware of how their audience will read those links.

So congratulations, internet. We did something that could never work in print. We are officially a unique art form. Take that, successful novelists!

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.

Recently, Pat Robertson claimed that if gay marriage is legalized, it won’t be long until we legalize sex with ducks. We all rolled our eyes, maybe got a couple laughs out of it, and then went on with our lives.

Then this happened:

This video’s been making the rounds for the last week, so there’s not much I can add in the way of commentary. Nonetheless, I have two thoughts on the matter.

One: I’m incredibly happy that all the funny people are in favor of gay marriage. To be fair, it’s entirely possible that someone’s trying to make an anti-gay marriage comedy video right now, but I’m having a hard time caring. I can’t even muster the energy to Google it.

Two: I am conflicted. I agree with this song’s message. I support legalizing gay marriage, and I definitely support using satire against idiots like Pat Robertson. And yet, I could easily throw away all my progressive credibility by writing a single sentence.

Specifically, “This video makes me wish I was a duck.”

Last weekend may have been Wolverine’s big solo blockbuster debut, but today he’s getting hassled by last year’s biggest Marvel moneymaker, Iron Man. It seems that while good old Logan was in the middle of doing his dayjob as a pitchman for some ringtone company, Iron Man saw it necessary to butt in and blow his cover, dancing “the Iron Man Dance,” forcing Wolvie’s mask onto his head and shouting, “be the Wolverine!”

Alright, I’m obviously fucking with you. While neither Varius nor myself have anything to do with the following video, “Iron Man” is played by my good friend and former roommate Greg, and he’s quite amusing. So, to all of our long-time readers who only follow this site because you went to college with us, well, you know the dude in the Iron Man mask, and that’s what that guy’s been up to. And to all the rest of you, well, the first 55 seconds of this video are pretty hilarious.

“Iron Man Dance… Iron Man Dance…”

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.

Membership in Second Life, the giant online game/community/virtual world that you’ve heard about but never used, is free. I didn’t know that until recently. When I learned that fact, an idea hit me:

Second Life is a free source of material for at least one post, and probably a series.

It is, after all, the place where all the scariest, most unpleasant motherfuckers on the internet come together to be totally uninhibited. A place where a man can say, “In my real life, I’m an accountant, but here I can by my true self: a panda with huge tits and both sets of genitals,” and be accepted and embraced by a whole huge-titted hermaphro-panda community. A place, in short, where I could find something to write about, whether or not those stereotypes turned out to be true.

My vision for this project was simple: I’d go undercover, knowing absolutely nothing about the game or its world. Once there, I’d investigate all the things you’ve heard about Second Life in the media. Would the other players be at least half-normal? Would they would look down on me for being a noob who didn’t own any in-game property? And (of course) is the game really a depraved 24/7 furry scat party like all the news reports say it is, or is it mostly just people walking around and chatting? This, I told myself, would be some funny shit.

I downloaded the necessary files from the Second Life website, I installed them, I set up my account, and I started playing.

And then I stopped playing, because it is fucking unplayable. My computer is old, and my internet connection isn’t as fast as it could be, but goddammit, it ran World of Warcraft just fine! This game, though, suffered from a fucking ridiculous level of slowness. Remember that first generation of 3D games, on the original Playstation and the Nintendo 64? How objects just appeared when you got close enough? How mountain ranges would just pop up out of nowhere?

Yeah. It’s like that, but with better graphics and about 1/10th of the speed. Oh, and sometimes you’ll see objects that aren’t supposed to be there at all! You’ll be standing around, and a cluster of weird-looking polygons will appear in the middle of the screen, and stay there until you adjust your camera.

I assumed this had to be a problem with my hardware — either the old computer, or the mediocre connection. To an extent, I was right. But then I watched a couple video tutorials put out by Linden Labs (the makers of Second Life, who I probably should’ve mentioned earlier), and the videos’ narrator wasn’t having much more luck. He clearly had a better system than I did, but the framerate was still choppy, and his avatar spent much of its time standing around, waiting for the scenery to load. The game even crashed on him while he was recording one of the tutorials, and he didn’t even bother cutting it out of the video. He knows how to edit — he’s making video tutorials, after all — and he decided to leave this in.

And that was the end of my undercover investigation of Second Life. Everything I learned, I got from articles and tutorials that are already freely available to anyone who wants to read them, whether or not they’ve played the game. I am able to bring absolutely nothing new to the table regarding this topic. I had some interesting points about the in-game economy, but it’s nothing you can’t find on your own. No, all I could come up with is some angry criticism of the game’s slowness.

Seriously, how fucking patient do you have to be to addicted to this game? At least with drugs, you have the instant gratification of getting high.