Sunday, December 28, 2008

I Can Has Cheezburger?: Cute cats with comical captions

Here's a simple idea that really took off: Adding funny captions to pictures of cats doing cute, silly, and stupid things.

Goodness gracious, I could have made millions.

It started with this ridiculous little picture...

I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?...and became a phenomenon that resulted in hundreds and hundreds of "lolcats" (these cat pictures with captions) springing up all over the Internet. There's a glorious repository at icanhascheezburger.com/.

Just a few samples of some of the earlier lolcats:

I HAS A FLAVORim in ur basketz cuddlin ur bearzMONORAIL CATINVISIBLE BIKEI made you a cookie... but I eated it.You Eated my Cookie?And they've even diversified to animals such as bunnies, mice, and, most notably, walrus.

Erm... walruses.

...Walri?

I has a bucketYou'll have notice the atrocious grammar by now. It's atrocious. And I promise you that prolonged exposure to lolcats increases the risk of irreparably diminished grammar and spelling.

Indeed, "lolspeak," as it is known, is quickly becoming the dominant dialect in no fewer than two of my social circles. If this is any indication, I suspect that lolspeak will be spoken by more people in the world than Esperanto in, oh, about two minutes or so.

To accomodate for all the religious people who has lost teh abilities to speek liak normul humanz, there is--I swear I am not making this up-- an ongoing LOLCat Bible Translation Project that aims to do exactly what you'd expect it to. (No, not make popcorn.)

I quote from the book of Genesis, chapter 1, verses 1-3:

1 Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem.
2 Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz.
3 At start, no has lyte. An Ceiling Cat sayz, i can haz lite? An lite wuz.

Ceiling CatYou can find the above picture and waaaaaaay more translated verses at www.lolcatbible.com, but it's best to spend a good long time at icanhascheezburger.com before you delve into that so that you can either fully appreciate the humor of the translation or understand completely why it's so offensive.

Go reads now. kthnxbye.

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