Paranoia and other pleasant things

Oh ma, look what the LOLcat brought in !

Most of the time, the Internet resembles a stadium, full of people sitting, eating, sharing their opinions, insulting each other because of said opinions and generally minding their own businesses . But sometimes, a Mexican wave sweeps through it, and most of the computers that form the web will be graced with the presence of a particular image/ video/ tune/ url on their hard disk. There was the dancing baby. (You don’t know what that is? Congratulations, you’re young. Not that I ain’t. And don’t give me that “you’re pushin’ 30, dudette” stare. 29 is so the new 21.) The dancing hamsters. The Numa-Numa kid, rocking out to a tune we Romanians understand the words of. The jolly Turkish guy with his trademark “I kiss you!” who probably inspired Borat. The guy in the Peter Pan outfits who looked so gay, he had to be hetero. The (….muthafuckin’) snakes on a(….muthafuckin’) plane .

The latest craze is the LOLcat.What’s that, you ask? In a nutshell, it’s the image of a cat with some horrendously spelled text Photoshopped on it. Doesn’t sound like much, eh? Hold your horses, kids. This thing is BIG.

First of all, the misspelled words aren’t chaotic, they seem to follow the pattern of a new English dialect. Don’t take my word for this, read instead a linguist’s opinion on the matter .

Second, it has already distinctive genres inside la grande masse of the mewers.
There’s the monorail cat:

The “I can has …” cat

The “I’m on your X” cat

The “Invisible X” cat

And my favorite, the “Oh hai” cat

Third, it has huge-traffic sites dedicated entirely to the LOLcat matter, like this. (The source for all the lovely cats that decorate this post, actually.)

Fourth, it spawned lots of imitations, featuring LOLdogs, LOLhamsters, LOLwalruses (always including in their captions something about a bucket they’re looking for) and - you’ll never guess it - LOLpresidents. Enjoy.

Posted under: chestii