A Disturbing Revelation

Generally, I really hate cats. I hate their aloof attitude, their general scorn for people, and they way they treat people as servants. I also hate that they make my lungs swell shut and my sinuses bleed, but I think these factors are only minor contributors. I also dislike cat people in general because they tend to share a lot of characteristics listed above. I believe that this world is generally populated by cat people and dog people. There may be a few genuine "animal lovers", but I am pretty sure that these folks are really just open-minded dog people. No matter how hard people try, dog people just don't mix well with cat people.

Anyway, I also tend to hate IM-speak, the ridiculous phrase-ology that people use while IM'ing or texting, things like LOL for "laugh out loud" or ROTF, "rolling on the floor", or ROLFMAO, "rolling on the floor, laughing my ass off". These aren't terrible, but some IM-speak is just gratingly obnoxious.

My feelings about cats and IM-speak have become conflicted lately, as a friend told me about the lolcats phenomenon. Wikipedia, take it away: "A Lolcat is an image combining a photograph of an animal, most frequently a cat, with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption in broken English referred to as Kitty Pidgin, or lolspeak."

Most of these funny images are of cats in unusual poses or with funny phrases, and much as I actively dislike cats and baby-talk/IM-speak, I find a lot of these lolcats to be snort-soda-out-your-nose funny. One of the first was the "I can haz cheezburger?" lolcat, with other popular themes involving monorail animals and the ceiling kitty that watches you do things. Several of these have inspired their own websites, including http://icanhascheezburger.com/ (BAD LINK FIXED, sorry) which has roughly a thousand of these images, and is growing by the day at roughly the same rate as gas prices. A lot of these are really good once you accept the fact that you have to read the text in your head as if you were congratulating a baby on an extra full diaper.

I think the shark one is particularly awesome. That's all for now...