The Glenn Beck Web-Site Lottery: How Many Beck Photos Can You Get on One Refresh?

By Alan Scherstuhl Wed., Feb. 15 2012 at 3:00 PM

Categories: Ick

Morning zoo sweater dumpling Glenn Beck is best known for saying ridiculous things on TV for a couple years and then suddenly not doing so anymore, probably because of the backstage scheming of Beck's greatest enemy, Woodrow Wilson. He also did some Founding Fathers cosplay and once held a rally where he honored Martin Luther King by denouncing the principles that Martin Luther King believed in.

Anyway, he used to be everywhere in our media culture, and then, suddenly, his voice was silenced, except for three hours of talk radio a day, a series of dumb books, frequent appearances on The O'Reilly Factor, his two web-sites, and another rally, in Israel this time because the forces that run the universe understood that that could be the funniest thing ever.

Turned out that rally isn't as funny as Beck's homepage, which looks like Gadhafi's Condi Rice scrapbooks, only with Glenn Beck, instead, and lots of ads for gold. At any given moment, there are at least 17 stock photos of Beck on the front page of GlennBeck.com.

There's business-casual Glenn Beck being studied in an art gallery:

There's book-mark shaped, peeking-at-you-from-the-side-of-the-screen Glenn Beck:

There's sitting-on-the-toilet-in-front-of-a-bust-of-George-Washington Glenn Beck:

There's an apple-cheeked Glenn Beck starring in a one-man-show about Lee Harvey Oswald:

There's the photo from Glenn Beck's missing-person flier:

There's an alternate-timeline Glenn Beck waking up in a sad and messy living room and discovering that his media celebrity was actually just the fevered daydream of a troubled mind:

And, if you're lucky with your refreshing, you just might get my favorite: A stock photo of Glenn Beck introducing an ad featuring that same stock photo of Glenn Beck.

Please, Glenn Beck, blow all our minds and upload a photo of yourself looking at that photo!

What number and assortment of Becks you get is a crapshoot depending on which ads and stories come up with each refresh. Our copy editor claims to have once got 21 Becks on one page; my highest has been 20. (That was last week.) When counting Becks, we do not include the tiny, repeated images teasing the site's current stories on the Facebook widget, but we certainly count the other images that appear multiple times.

And it goes without saying that the stories on the site are mostly nonsense. Still, even Beck gets one right once in a while:

I bet it's Glenn Beck in that Vader costume.
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Follow Alan Scherstuhl on Twitter at @studiesincrap, SF Weekly's Exhibitionist blog at @ExhibitionistSF and like us on Facebook.

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"Arf!" Lemming

Megalomaniac.

BDL

I'm up to 18 Becks after one refresh! I wonder if this game is what me meant by "entertainment" in that goofy subtitle of his: "The fusion of entertainment and enlightenment."

Glasslass

Ask yourself one question - what if Glenn Beck is right? What will you do then?

That's two questions.

Alan Scherstuhl

I will perform a citizen's arrest on George Lucas.

TreeA

Oh, I wish to live in the alternate reality: "... waking up in a sad and messy living room and discovering that his media celebrity was actually just the fevered daydream of a troubled mind"