This fark comment thread was inspired by an article by Slate about the Lolcats phenomenon. What the heck is that you ask? Well Wikipedia says:

Lolcats, a portmanteau of lol and cat^[1], are photos of cats with comedic captions. They are a type of image macro, and are thus also referred to as cat macros. Lolcats are created for the purpose of sharing them with others on imageboards (particularly 4chan) and other internet forums, especially on Saturdays (“Caturdays”).^[2]

Lolcat images consist of a photo of a cat with a caption characteristically formatted in a sans serif font such as Impact or Arial Black.^[3] The image is, on occasion, photoshopped for effect. The caption generally acts as a speech balloon encompassing a comment from the cat, or is a simple description of the depicted scene. The caption is intentionally written with deviations from standard English spelling and syntax^[3] featuring “strangely-conjugated verbs, but tend to converge to a new set of rules in spelling and grammar.”^[4] These altered rules of English have been referred to as a type of pidgin^[3] or baby talk.^[5] The text is frequently in the form of a snowclone.

Lolcats are similar to other animal-based image macros, such as the O RLY? owl and captioned pictures of walruses (lolruses), dogs, hamsters, birds, and rabbits.^[6] Various deviations of Lolcats have appeared as well, such as Roflcat.

And if you really have not encountered these before……Go here for a crash course — but make sure you’re either in a sparsely populated room or at home, so as to minimize on the crazy looks you’ll get upon giggling fits.

BTW, I’m planning to upload a bunch of Kip pictures to Flickr so they can get lolcat’ed too…..but give me some time, I’ve gotta work you know? Oh, but let me leave you with this picture…