It’s early January, and everyone on the internet is busy putting together their “Best of 2008″ lists. On top of that, it’s a Sunday, which many websites regard as a content-free day. Lucky for you, I discovered some mind-blowing weirdness earlier this week, and am now compelled to share it.

Behold, Lasagna Cat! Created by someone or something called Fatal Farm, the site takes a truly unpleasant premise — “What if we made poorly green-screened live-action versions of old ‘Garfield’ comic strips?” — and uses it to find humor in what would normally be stupefyingly unfunny. On top of that, each strip reenactment is followed by a musical tribute to “Garfield” creator Jim Davis.

These tributes range from simple parodies of well-known music videos to explorations of the complex inner life of Garfield’s owner Jon… You know what? It’s easier to just show you:

See? Jon’s got it pretty rough.

I don’t know what it is that makes these videos work. Maybe it’s the grotesque, ill-fitting costume worn by the actor portraying Garfield, or the inappropriateness of the songs, or the not-quite-concealed contempt for the source material. Maybe it’s the way that all these forms of banality — lame comic strips, painfully earnest pop music, ugly wigs — come together and transform into something almost sublime. Maybe it’s the fact that your average “Garfield” fan would probably think a lot of these videos were sincere, loving tributes.

Indeed, because this is the internet, I must assume that an intrepid fanfic author is, at this very moment, composing a heartrending tale about Jon’s miserable bachelorhood and Garfield’s cold indifference to his plight, and really meaning every last word of it. Before you start thinking too hard about that, here’s another video:

If that one doesn’t convince you of the goodness and rightness of Lasagna Cat’s mission, nothing will. Really, the only problem I can see is that it took me almost a year to discover this madness.

To everyone who complained during the election that the press was being sexist in its coverage of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin: well, fine, sure, by and large, we’re a superficially-minded culture. I’ll grant that. As a society, we pay a lot of attention to appearance. But it works both ways. By now, you’ve probably seen that paparazzi photo of President-Elect Barack Obama in his swim trunks during his Christmas vacation in Hawaii. If not, here it is:

Yes, feast your eyes, ladies! And enjoy it while you can, because The Beak is not going to get into the habit of regularly displaying eye candy, no matter how culturally or politically significant it may or may not be. But here’s where it gets amusing. In their coverage last week, the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph declared Obama “Best of the World Leaders” because of how good he looks without a shirt on.

You know… speaking as an American, while the whole thing makes us a little uncomfortable, we’ve spent so long with a president that everyone hates, that we’ll just sit back and be happy that the international press is saying nice things for a change.

But it gets weirder, because the Telegraph’s article goes on to compare Obama to other shirtless world leaders. Poking fun at their own former Prime Minister, the Telegraph says,

“Tony Blair was pictured topless while on holiday in the Caribbean in 2006, displaying the body of a man who had spent nearly 10 years enjoying the hospitality at diplomatic receptions and state banquets.”

Ouch. The piece goes on to mock President Nicholas Sarkozy and his doughy French “love handles.” But just in case you thought Obama was getting a free ride here, the Telegraph concluded with praise for former Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “barrel chest and rugged arms,” (no, I’m not making that up), displayed in photos from a Siberian fishing trip that were reportedly released by the Kremlin in 2007.

Well… at least we don’t have to worry about the world being run by those walking pigs from Animal Farm any time soon. Now let’s never speak of this again.

The first video ever to go up on YouTube may have been some geek standing in front of the elephant cage, but it’s a virtual certainty that somewhere in the first hundred or so uploaded clips, there must have been at least one scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Now, after more than three years of seeing fans cobble together their favorite clips from any available source and throw them online in an orgy of British comedy fan-geek duty, the Monty Python crew are finally striking back. Of course, knowing instinctively that fighting against the copyright infringement would be both tiresome and futile, the Pythons have chosen a far more important fish to fillet: the crappy picture quality and amateur editing of the available clips.

Last month the Monty Python dudes launched The Monty Python Channel on YouTube, which is exactly what it sounds like. The channel features classic sketches from Flying Circus, as well as songs and clips from the movies, all in beautiful high-quality formatting and sensible compression. It also has this lovely new introduction video, which sort of doubles as a commentary on the weirdness of media marketing in the year 2008:

Essentially it’s an attempt to rekindle fans’ interest in all things Python and make them want to buy the same material on DVD. But that’s the beauty of the Cory Doctorow Method: give it away for free, and then convince people to pay for it anyway, in slightly prettier packaging. Well done, gentlemen.

For those critics who have suggested that Barack Obama has not spoken to the American people enough since his victory three weeks ago, I have an answer for you: you’re not thinking geekily enough. While the President-Elect may be focusing on assembling his cabinet and giving vague answers to reporters, he’s also taken time out to talk to Planet Internet. I’m talking, of course, about Your Weekly Address from the President-Elect, broadcasting now on YouTube.

This week’s installment focuses on the job market in the coming years, and it’s half-impressive and half-not-specific-enough:

Sounds good, but there’s one statement in particular that I’d like to comment on:

“We’ll put people back to work rebuilding our crumbling roads and bridges, modernizing schools that are failing our children, and building wind farms and solar panels, fuel-efficient cars and the alternative energy technologies that can free us from our dependence on foreign oil and keep our economy competitive in the years ahead.”

I think I speak for millions of young working Americans with shitty jobs when I say, “Tell me where and when, Mr. President, and I’ll be there.” Seriously, I want in on this. Obama says that he and his new economic team will be “working out the details in the weeks ahead,” and hopefully those details include a how-to for people who want to participate.

I mean, where will we apply for these jobs? What sort of training will we need? I don’t know how to make solar panels! Do I need to go to engineering school, or will there be some sort of apprenticeship program? Can I take Alternative Energy Technologies 101 at the local Community College? These are things that need to be addressed, because it’s not enough to create the jobs; there must also be a system in place for Americans to become eligible for those jobs.

President-Elect Obama, we’re ready to build your wind farms. Please give us our marching orders.

Update, 2:55 PM: Well, this shit’s going viral. That’s what happens when you fuck with someone’s internet fame.

Two days ago, I faced a dilemma. After all, we had just elected Barack Obama as our new President. You know, that handsome young fellow who was always talking about change and hope, but doing so in a way where you still felt like a fucking adult when he was done? Yeah, that was neat, and it was really encouraging to know that millions of my fellow Americans agreed.

Still, I felt a peculiar sadness — what would I do without my precious outrage? How could I be funny when I wasn’t surrounded by idiots? Well, a big fat mixed blessing showed up in the form of a protest against California’s Proposition 8. Specifically, at about 2:40 in the following video.

Now, I don’t know those two guys getting smacked around by the cops. But about half the people I follow on Twitter do, and countless friends of theirs know them as well. For the last few hours, my stupid little Twitter client has been lighting up with one bit of terrible news after another. Nobody knows what the charges are, and bail’s been set at some ridiculous amount.

So there we have it. They sent an internet-famous person to jail for thinking gay people should be allowed to get married in a state where it was already fucking legal until a couple days ago. The internet will kick back furiously, of course. In the end, nothing will be accomplished because maybe he said the F-word in front of a cop, and therefore the pundits will claim the ensuing brutality and arrest were completely justified (assuming they notice at all).

All in all, it was a fun couple of days, but I’m officially done being hopeful. It’s time I got back to my busy schedule of god-mocking and America-hating.

It’s about thirty-two hours until the first polls close, and I really can’t focus on anything anymore. But here’s a particularly poignant video from Slate, which is really funny until you remember that moving to Canada isn’t actually this easy, at which point the whole thing becomes rather depressing.

I won’t name names, but I once knew a guy who was the very definition of “rich asshole” — obsessed with his social standing, blind to his own privilege, and all too willing to offer bad advice to the little people. Nothing about the experience was terribly fun, until the day one of my friends made a simple comment:

“He’s the sort of person who would ride a horse until it died, just to see if he could.”

From this simple statement was born our favorite party game, in which we sat around trying to dream up the ultimate example of upper-upper-class depravity, conjuring a character who tortured servants, hunted pandas, and colonized the everloving shit out of India.

If I may change the subject for a moment, I’d like to once again point out that Sarah Palin supports using an airplane to chase down wolves until they can’t run anymore, and then shooting them.

Now then, who wants to play a game?

Because Sarah Palin would absolutely ride a horse until it died, and then mock the dead horse for being weak. Sarah Palin would wound a moose, but not kill it, and then leave it to bleed to death on an enemy’s front lawn. Sarah Palin would hire child-servants with the exact same birthdays as her own children, and then make them wait tables at her kids’ parties — and if you cry, you don’t get paid.

Seriously, make up your own, and convince your friends do it too. Post them to your own sites. Write a song and post a video for it, and then offer it as a downloadable ringtone. Turn them into a series of collectible action figures for all I care.

The point is, the Crimes of Sarah Palin are funnier and more horrible than that Chuck Norris bullshit, and I’m confident that you, the reader, can think of a few. I’m less confident that you’ll remember to link back to us, but stranger things have happened.

Michelle Allen of Middleton, Ohio, earned her fifteen minutes on Monday when she donned a cow suit and rampaged through her neighborhood, urinating on porches and chasing children in the streets. Ms. Allen was arrested for disorderly conduct, threatened to “cause problems” if she was taken to jail, and chose to continue wearing the cow suit for her mugshot.

Alright, so it’s not that weird. In fact, I know a few people who would probably do the same thing, if only they had access to a cow suit. Hell, I’ll go so far as to say that the lack of a cow suit has kept some of my friends out of jail. But Michelle Allen, a true agent of Chaos, took the initiative to acquire a cow suit, and took the further initiative to get really drunk, piss all over her neighbors, and run around in traffic. And that’s why Michelle Allen is Hero of the Day. The Beak salutes you.

The Large Hadron Rap has been a big hit on YouTube for a few months now, so it’s likely that some of you have already seen it. It’s worth mentioning again, however, as it’s more instantly accessible and informative than 90% of the LHC coverage out there. And we need accessible, because when explanations are dense, the public at large gives up and starts to panic about black hole scaremongering.

The physics in the rap is spot-on, and the rhyming is eloquent in a very nerdy way. Lines like, “There is no Higgs we need new physics to account for why/ things have mass, something in our standard model went awry,” are pure poetry, and worthy of a cover by the Arctic Monkeys.

The acronyms mentioned repeatedly in the chorus refer to the four particle detectors stationed around the LHC ring. The gargantuan ATLAS (A Toroidal LHC Apparatus), weighing in at 7,000 tons, houses an enormous superconducting magnet, designed to bend particles as they fly by, in hopes of finding heavy electrons called muons. CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) works as a cross-check for ATLAS, with an even stronger magnet that manipulates particles with a force 100,000 times stronger than the magnetic field naturally generated by the Earth’s core. LHCb (LHC Beauty) is designed to detect B mesons, which are heavy particles that decay instantly upon creation. The fourth detector, ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment), doesn’t even come into the picture until the CERN researchers are done with protons and switch over to colliding much heavier lead ions.

Now, what I just said probably didn’t make a whole lot of sense, which is why it’s so vital to summarize it musically. So, without further ado, here’s Alpine Kat:

The delightful young lady rapping and dancing in the video is Katie McAlpine (whose rapping name is Alpine Kat, of course), a freelance science writer who spent some time as interim press liason at CERN, and currently does excellent work in New Scientist. If you’re wondering whether she’s a true nerd or merely a flash in the pan, I submit exhibit B, the Neurochip Rap. I’d say her reputation is safe.

Oh, and Katie, if you’re reading this, and if you’re ever in New York, look me up and I will buy you as many beers as you’re willing to sit through.

Remember that Matt Damon video from a couple weeks ago? Where he compared the rise of Sarah Palin to a bad Disney movie?

Someone took the initiative.

Dude.