The lolcats, the Internet's most famous felines, may be hilarious. But in their yearning, I see nothing less than the tragedy of the human condition.
By Jay Dixit
Salon.com
By now, even the most casual observers of the Internet are aware that lolcats have become a certifiable Internet phenomenon. Their flagship site, Icanhascheezburger.com, is one of Web 2.0's big success stories -- on track to top a billion page views this year -- and its content is entirely user-generated. Readers upload over 5,000 homegrown submissions every day, of which six or eight are posted on the site. And in October, the lolcats got their very own coffee table book, "I Can Has Cheezburger," published by Gotham Books.
I love lolcats. I'm not ashamed to admit it. Sure, they've been around for almost two years -- but the site posts fresh new jokes every day, and I'm never disappointed.
But what draws me to the site even more than what's funny is what's sad. My favorite lolcats are not the rapscallions pining for "cheezburgers" or helpfully upgrading your RAM, but rather a brilliant and underappreciated subgenre of sad lolcats -- tragic figures of grief, yearning and unrequited love. But I'll come back to that.
Read more: http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/1 ... index.html
