The Beak » Breakfast with the Beak

It’s another musical episode, and this week we’re telling an entire generation to shut the hell up. We examine the horrible secrets of Billy Joel’s big list of stuff that happened, from the overly broad references to the slightly cheated rhyme scheme. Could this song be written today? Could it be written again next week? […]

Things are about to get non-Euclidean and kind of gross, because we’re talking about H.P. Lovecraft and his possible connection to the wild world of obscene tentacle illustration. Was he a major influence on the form, or is it just Rule 34 working its dirty, dirty magic? Does anyone get laid in Lovecraft-land? Does it […]

If you could take characters from one work and put them in another work, which ones would you choose? More importantly, how would you make it as funny and/or stupid as possible? We’re a lot more interested in the latter question, and we find a few decent answers to it. If you’re interested in festive […]

We were promised a plague, but what we got was a few weeks of harmless bugs minding their business and occasionally chirping. Where were the decimated crops? The blotted-out skies? The children carried off by the swarm? Funny story: cicadas don’t do any of that. Luckily, they’re still big and gross, and we can probably […]

We all have to die eventually, so why not go out with one last zinger? That’s basically the question we’re asking this week, even as we try to pretty it up by calling it educational. We’ve got Karl Marx’s last (short) rant, Voltaire’s deathbed burn, and Socrates’ least graceful dialogue, along with electric chair puns […]

In a way, this is kind of the only topic. Like, anywhere, ever. Se we’re making a serious effort to add something new to the conversation. Inevitably, this leads us into an abyss of fast food mythology, terrible movies, Mormon kitsch, and desperately earnest mask-makers — you know, all the classics. Will this journey through […]

Someone asked us to talk about a forgettable and mostly-forgotten movie from 2010. So we did, and discovered a tale about a bunch of douchebags hiding in a condo, plus aliens or something. Is it absolute garbage, or is it one of those movies that gets everything just wrong enough to be irritating? Which of […]

This week, the very foundations of the show crack and we spiral down into an abyss of terrible ideas. How terrible? How about marsupials teaching you history? Starchy omelets? Lots and lots of eye-gouging? And if that’s somehow not enough for you, we sing. Let that sink in. Subscribe via RSS Subscribe via iTunes Download […]

Well this is awkward. It’s almost Tesla’s birthday, and who should show up on our topic list but his old arch-enemy? What should we say? Do we even understand the principles of electrical engineering? Is being a good manager the same thing as being a good inventor? Can we find something nice to say about […]

Wait, Republican hipsters? Is that even a real thing? Seriously, we spend most of this episode trying to figure it out. It’s a thrilling journey through a world of Biblical breath mints, ugly fonts, drunk Ron Paul fanboys, and Ed Hardy preachers, all set to soothing Brooklyn background noise. Because we may have left the […]