The internet is less about cuteness than it used to be.

When's the last time anybody prodded anybody to look at cuteoverload.com or I Can Has Cheezburger?

In the business of trendspotting, it's hard to notice what we're not doing. Am I the first to notice the end of cuteness?

Here. Test yourself: Are you charmed to know that Gary Matthews, a 48-year-old "retired technology worker," "thinks he is a dog," and "wears a dog collar, eats dog food from a bowl — his favorite is Pedigree – and loves milk bones and dog cookies"?

Or do you think: Why are ABC and National Geographic giving air to mental disorders/lame entertainers? Is it to distract us from Obama's lies? And what's with "retiring" at age 48? Is that part of the economic downward spiral?

Althouse has spotted the end of the cuteness trend.
	True.
	In fact, the trend continues. (Show your proof in the comments.)
	There never was such a trend. And thanks, Althouse, for including an option for cranks like me.
pollcode.com free polls

"O HAI Ann Althouse!"

"Now you know how to greet people in Lolspeak."

On Flickr, just now, where they keep changing the "language" they use for the greeting.

Kinda makes me nostalgic for the old days when people were into lolcats and the like. Where did that all go? And what are the many web trends we've already forgotten?

I had to do it.

After this.


moar funny pictures

We were talking about khat, and Kev said...

"I thought khat-blogging had kind of gone out of style lately."

I thought I'd do a post with a LOLcat, saying something on this theme, so I went to Flickr to find a picture of a cat, and I got pleasantly distracted by this comment on the photograph that I blogged yesterday. Screen grab:



See? The commenter — jjmadison — has a cat face avatar and his comment — "wow, all that on two packs of Splenda??" — continues the drug theme. Ah! My drug of choice is synchronicity. I'm high on it now. I'm even singing: Oh! Oh! Oh!

Not really, but I do have to shout above the din of my Rice Krispies.

Now, somewhat giddy, I do still want to make that LOLcat, and I search my Flickr photographs for "cat." But I haven't been good about labels over there, and the collection of "cat"-labeled photos seems a bit absurd. There's a latte with a foam cat face. A picture of a poster that says "Don't Shoot the Cat." There's the very young me with a cat and my same-age son with a cat:



[ADDED: Yes, Chris is holding a "Hilter cat" and we were just talking about Facebook groups like "G-D BLESS HITLER," but stay away from the Nazi synchronicity. The brown-shirt acid that is circulating around us is not specifically too good.]

There are the pages from my Amsterdam sketchbook about the Cat Museum — the Katten Kabinet. There are some bat orts.

Most absurd, there is a set of LOLcats, made from photos taken of paused — pawsed — frames from the movie "La Dolce Vita."

What was that all about? Don't you remember back on August 11, 2007, when TRex said "Every time I look in over [at Althouse], something so weird is going on that I feel like I just bumbled on to the set of a Fellini film," and I was all:

"Im in ur hair/Lickin ur i"
"Im ur soul/gettin outta heer"
"Ur head/my roller coaster"
"Im ur/windsheeled wipurrz"

But these Rice Krispies were enough, and I don't want an egg at this hour. So I look to you, dear readers, to pick up Kev's khat-blogging theme and make some LOLcats. You can make them here, and you can email them to me at annalthouse (at) gmail (dot) com.

I'd love to pass out some of the Althouse blog drugs: frontpaging and tags.

And I'm hoping TRex will bumble over here and see that something weird is going on. And also that something crawls from the slime at the bottom of a dark Scottish lake.

UPDATE: From Lem:



AND: From Zachary Paul Sire:



AND: From Palladian:



From Kev (who started all this):

Bayh?

The buzz says Bayh:

Senator Obama is headed for Elkhart, Indiana, tomorrow, where he is scheduled to campaign with Senator Bayh, who is being described in some quarters as the "safe" choice for Mr. Obama as a running mate. As a former chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, Mr. Bayh might be seen as a centrist who can help make good on Mr. Obama's talk of working to bridge party differences and unite America.

But the NY Sun says Bayh "has lurched to the left in an effort to make himself palatable to the party's base of hard-left activists and special interest groups":

He voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts....

Mr. Bayh has also lost his bearings in pursued of the left wing of organized labor...

He has pandered on the Constitution, as one of just 14 Democrats in 2006 who backed an amendment giving Congress the power to ban flag-burning. On January 22, 2004, he voted against school vouchers in Washington, D.C., a bill that more reasonable Democrats such as Senators Feinstein and Schumer supported. He filibustered to block a vote on confirming John Bolton as the Bush administration's ambassador at the United Nations....

Hmmm. I realize I have no opinion on Evan Bayh. I can't even picture him. I've never progressed beyond the stage of making an effort not to call him Birch Bayh. Okay, I just looked at a picture of him. I still can't picture him.

ADDED: The reason I can't picture Bayh is that after I look at a photograph of him, my attempt to picture him calls up a picture of John Edwards. What is it with these candidates wanting their partner to be a bland pretty boy? I remember when George H.W. Bush picked the boyishly good-looking Dan Quayle, but Kerry and now, apparently, Obama are following the pattern. It's ironic that after all that talk about how he doesn't look like all those other Presidents "on the dollar bills," Obama is choosing a man for his looks. Is this supposed to appeal to women? What's notable is that he passed up Hillary Clinton, the person with the strongest claim to the position, and that's going to irritated a lot of her supporters.

AND: I vlog my objection to the Bayh choice.

IN THE COMMENTS: Tara van Brederode says:

I kind of like the sound of "Obama/Bayh" ... though I can't help turning it into the Hindi "Obama Bhai," which means "Obama [my] brother." Then again, there's "Obama Bai," for the "kthxsbai" LOL-cat crowd. And I suppose McCain can make hay with "Obama bye." Or the capitalists: "Obama buy."

kthxsbai.

I am not an online jackass.

I only scored 4 on this "Are You an Online Jackass?" quiz. In the last 30 days, I vlogged (4 points), and I visited MySpace (1 point). I have not invited someone to add their photo to a Flickr group, complained that someone reblogged a third party's content without crediting me for finding it first, talked like a LOLcat in real life, or any of the many things that you are probably doing and which make you an online jackass.

Blogged from the airport.

(I bet they'd have put ended a blog post with "Blogged from the airport" if they'd thought of it.)

"WHAT DI DHE DO AFORE HOW LONG AND WITH WHO ?? PLS TELL BOB HELLO BOB."

Nice to see Hillary Clinton has some top-flight people working for her.

IN THE COMMENTS: I ask "Is her deputy campaign manager a LOLcat?"

IM IN UR CAMPANE GRILLIN YR D00DS....

DO U HAV DE OBAM DIRTZES? I NEEDZ DEM BADS. PWN HIM WOO!!!!!111 BOB HI

Philolsophers.

Because lolcats are too shallow for you: philolsophers. Via Language Log, which is trying to figure it all out:

Anthropologists are going to ask, why did people way back in the early 21st century find these mangled and misspelled captions so funny? U can haz undRstand lolcats?...

...Why did the bar girls who told us these jokes fall about laughing at them? They admitted it made no sense. The line about soap and radio was just some sort of internal private lolcat for them. Until today I never knew why, but now I do, because after I posted the first version of this it was only an hour before a Language Log reader pointed me to the Wikipedia article...

So let's check the Wikipedia article. Well, that explains "no soap, radio." Wikipedia explains lolcats here: ".... See also: cuteness."



SEE ALSO: This one. This too. And this.