FoxTrax Blog

(courtesy of icanhascheezburger.com)

Lolcats are one of those bizarre phenomena called memes.

A meme (in the modern context anyway) is something that spreads like wildfire across the internet for no apparent reason! Have you or someone you love recently opened a webpage only to be confronted with that awful Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up"? As anyone ever told you that all "your base" were "belong to us"? Has someone ever forwarded you a webpage of dancing hamsters? These are memes.

A bizarre side effect of the information age is the apparent need for people to share mindless, yet amusing, trifles with complete strangers.

Enter the LOLcat.

How, exactly, it occurred to anyone to write over pictures of cats using cutesy broken English and phrases like "gimme teh bukket" eludes me. But it's a big enough thing that you see it referenced on shirts, in pop culture, there are websites of lolcats, there are websites that parody lolcats, there's even a LOLCode programming language being developed that uses the bizarre sub-English prominent in LOLcat photos. Here's a snippet:

---

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
GIMMEH VAR
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10?
 YARLY
  BTW this is true
  VISIBLE "BIG NUMBER!"
 NOWAI
  BTW this is false
  VISIBLE "LITTLE NUMBER!"
 KTHX
KTHXBYE

---

And once again, I sit back and thank my lucky stars that I'm lucky enough to live in a world where things that make no sense and have zero practical application can exist. Not only can they exist, they can propagate and flourish. Doesn't that make the world a far more interesting place?

kthxbye

Labels: GPS, humor, technology