Kitty Ha-Ha

Ever go to the grocery store and see those tabloids? Or even the classy Hollywood rags like People? Ever wonder who buys them? Are they teeny-bopper girls trying to figure out who's hot in Hollywood or not? (Is Ashton Kutcher no longer hot?). Are the middle-aged, soap-opera watching blue-haired ladies?

Why on Oprah's (and Al Gore's) green Earth would they waste their time trying to keep up with these pointless trends? Don't the have real lives?

But sadly, we in geekdom have our own dirty laundry, our own fetish. What it is depends on whatever moves the geek community.

Lately, it's been cats. Cats that are semi-illiterate. They get into everything! They're watching us from everywhere! And with such bad English!

As with any such trend, we geeks must give it a name, and indeed, we have. These cats are called lolcats, which puts two words together that only a geek could love. There's cats, of course. And there's lol.

Lol, for the IM/chat/messageboard deprived is short for "laughing out loud". When someone writes something funny, they type "lol".

Thus, these cats are "lolcats" although it's difficult to tell whether we are the ones laughing at the cats or whether, in their infinite curiosity, and plans to take over the world (or at least our hard drives) are the ones lol-ing at us.

Indeed, it must be so, because Wikipedia says it's so.

Here's one of the top blogs devoted to lolcats.

If you pay attention, you can begin to construct the grammar used in lol cat postings, and while most of us lack the geek chops or desire to do this, one Anil Dash has spared you the effort.

Lolcats appears to be a few months old, say, since the end of last year. Perhaps they were around longer, but needed time before enough of geekdom embraced these wily kitties.

The rest of us can worry about who adopted whom, why LiLo's life is down the toiler, why David Hasselhoff prefers to dine on the floor, why Alec Baldwin yells at his daughter. You know, useful stuff.