Radar: What a Bunch of Unfunny Pussies

(Apologies)

I was about to - being the "hateful" sumbitch I apparently am - light into Radar scribe Alex Littlefield for this humorless, half-assed, mostly false piece on the LOLDEDCAT (NSFW) "trend."  About to say something like: 

I hate (See?  SEE?!  I'm full of hate.) being attacked by the functionally incapable; having to temper the need to defend yourself with pity sucks all the joy out of retribution.

It's confusing as to how anyone could so completely swerve around the point.  Despite what Nellie McKay's said about me, I'm not "a person who enjoys violence."  I may have a sick sense of humor, but I don't revel in roadkill.  For these poor ex-cats it was just a case of wrong place, wrong time:  They were victims of a meme that had long exhausted itself.

Choire Sicha found this obvious.  What do I have to do, Littlefield?  Draw you a picture?

Cheezburger Nation's braintrust gathers together - no doubt in-between screenings of Billy Madison - to congratulate themselves on perfecting baby talk for which, if there is a God, they will never have any practical use.  You'd hope the lure of infantilism would exhaust itself.  Then again, America's Funniest Home Videos has been running for seventeen years.  Maybe when Joe Rogan's hosting Cab Driver Caption This! with cute cat pics on FOX...

I was about to say all this.  Then I realized that I was the one missing the point:  The Radar piece wasn't expressing the honest shock of anything.  It's a clever parody of lame Intertard satire, an assault on ironic outrage

It should have been obvious.  There's just no way a professional publication, even one as intermittently extant as Radar, would pay someone to seriously spew out something like this:  "LOLCATS, in fact, is a delightfully light-hearted collection of cat photos and misspelled captions, punctuated, as is to be expected, by the occasional blemish of vapidity."

The article simultaneously contradicts itself and buttresses its various arguments with invented facts.  LOLDEDCATS is a "disturbing trend," but one that "doesn't fly with Internet-goers."  There are supposedly "several deranged individuals," when really there's just singularly deranged me.  That bit about the site being shuttered?  Up and ugly, always has been.  But "Littlefield" - I'm assuming a fictional construct, no genuine journo would put their real name on something like this - covers his/her tracks by never citing specifics.  There's no link to my site (just a mention of the front page address, where the bulk of the photos (again, NSFW) never appeared), and certainly no link or mention toward any others.  There are no inflammatory examples mentioned; the only explicit description is - in a sign that the author secretly enjoys the violence he/she so secretly loathes - a delicious hypothetical situation involving an orange tabby, a tractor trailer, and the word "smeared."

So much would-be humor on the Internet is predicated on the poorly thought-through.  Erroneous assertions and straw men.  It's all about hiding behind screens, railing against brittle fantasy constructs.  And that's the basis for the bulk of the Radar piece.  (A bit underdeveloped, perhaps, despite the inclusion of useless space-fillers like "you guessed it."  They missed, for example, the opportunity to mock-employ explicit sarcasm - which never works over the Internet - and they should have included a damning, made-up quote from someone.  Someone like Nellie McKay.)

But "Littlefield's" creators really get sharp at the end, subverting their own faux-columnist's catperson outrage by comparing the unfortunate, often accidental deaths of the featured felines to tragic, avoidable, pervasive human violence.  You know, the sort of important things we ignore so we have more time to OMG! fuck around with Photoshop.  The lesson here:  More authors should accidentally upbraid themselves.

Radar, I am humbled.  My garish one-time assault on meme culture has been subtly shown up.

Anyway.  Stay tuned for my LOLocaust series!  If you understand pidgin Yiddish, it'll be funnier than Shoah!  Shorter, too.

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This has nothing to do with dead memes, and everything to do with The Rock and Roll:  The Prairie Cartel answered my prayers and made the live version of "Suitcase Pimp" available for download at their myspace.  Zowee.

The Prairie Cartel - Suitcase Pimp (Live) (mp3)

That thing's got an arena-sized sound.  If you feel a drop off in-between choruses, don't worry:  By the end it keeps all its promises.  Kicks it, licks it.  It will advance you, it will enhance you, it will command you.  Just let it take its 10% off the top and everything will be cool.

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Nice Socks, Dept.:  What's on Britt Daniels' Bookshelf/Floor?

Also:  "The Underdog" is a Billy Joel song.

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Condoms, Always Dept.:  The Morality of Zombie Sex

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Sentence Commuted Dept.:  House of Re-Animator.  "The Vice-President has a heart attack and keels over, so they invite Herbert West to bring him back to life. Things don't go well, and eventually the President has to be reanimated... I'd like to make it as clearly about the Bush White House as possible. The thing about that administration is that they're such death-dealers, all they seem to be successful at is killing people." (via)

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All Out of Strikes Dept.:  What fresh steaming pile of damnation is this?

tags: lolcats  lolzcats  loldedcats  radar magazine  gawker  spoon  prairie cartel  adam sandler  self importance  caturday  

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