Glenn Beck said goodbye to his audience and looked back on his tumultuous tenure at Fox News on Thursday, the last episode of the 'Glenn Beck Show' (weekdays, 5PM on Fox News). Of course, there was the requisite career retrospective full of clips from his time on the network, starting with his first show January 19, 2009. Media Matters had released their own highlight reel of Beck's most outrageous statements earlier in the day, but Beck's focused on the good times.

"This is only the third time that I've actually done live TV, so buckle up 'cuz it could get very, very bumpy," he said on that first broadcast. The mostly goofy clips that followed confirmed that, as Beck struggled to find the correct camera to address and pieces of his backdrop fell behind him, interrupting a rant about out of control government.

Glenn Beck (weekdays, 5PM ET on Fox News) has thrown cold water on the chatter that secret government activity, end-times prophecies, or something else sinister resulted in thousands of bird and fish deaths in Arkansas over the past week.

According to Beck, these conspiracy theories have popped up because the media hasn't done a good job of putting the mass animal deaths into proper context.

"I spent all of 30 seconds Googling this story and suddenly there is a little context," Beck explained. "A little bit of history. 5,600 stories of history to be exact ... Way back in the time machine of 2004 millions of fish washed up in Maryland ... "

Beck then cited other examples of fish and bird deaths before concluding these events are actually fairly commonplace, and don't suggest anything out of the ordinary.

While we never really thought the dead fish and birds were harbingers of the apocalypse, Beck's new role as a rational-minded debunker of hysteria has caught us so off guard that we're now seriously considering stocking up on canned goods and bottled water.

Forbes has an interesting article about the sources of Glenn Beck's income. Interestingly, only $2 million of his $32 million annual salary comes from his Fox News show where he gets most of his publicity. The majority of the money comes from his radio and publishing empire. It could be said that Fox News is the platform from which he hawks the rest of his wares.

But as Master Yogurt said, merchandising is where the real money from the movie comes from. Pretty soon I'm sure we'll be seeing the Glenn Beck action figure, the Glenn Beck cookbook, the Glenn Beck barbecue grill and the Glenn Beck video game for the Wii which will come with its own interactive chalkboard.

However, to put things in perspective: no matter how much the man makes from his media empire, Glenn Beck will still make a lot less in annual income than Oprah.