Everyone knows The Los Angeles Times, right? They’ve been around for ages covering all the stories people want to read about, keeping up on important issues and informing the public. But what you didn’t know was that they are also inept at being able to discern that featuring LOLcats on their website is not exactly a smart move, especially considering not only how old it is in Internet years but also that there are much more pressing and important matters that should be addressed by a widely read newspaper.
It’s hard to believe that there are still some people out there who don’t know what a LOLcat is, but this doesn’t mean that a full article is called for in the hopes of enlightening readers on the success of Ben Huh and his “kitty site.” The fact that they actually have to explain what “LOL” stands for in a digital age where web shorthand is almost the norm is, well, laughable and kind of sad. But this is the part of the article that really got me:
The LOLcats phenomenon began on a popular online bulletin board, 4chan.
This one sentence does it in for me. 4chan should NEVER be mentioned in public blogs that have a reputation like the LA Times, never. 4chan is far from being family friendly, if anyone reading this knows it then they would have to agree. You don’t plug a site like 4chan as something as unassuming as just a “popular online bulletin board.” There are things I’ve seen on 4chan that cannot be unseen and I am deeply traumatized because of it. To unleash such a thing onto the public like the LA Times has is just plain cruel. Anyone with half a brain could easily just type 4chan into a search engine and be submitted to horrors beyond horrors. Sure, there are some nice things on there too that can be innocent enough, but that’s not typically what the site is known for.
Also, publishing the article in the Business section does not make it any better. Do they think that people will take it seriously at all just because of the category? Nein, I say. It just makes it even more ridiculous and silly than LOLcats already is. The absurdity of trying to publish a serious article on something like this, complete with a quote from someone whose made hundreds of the macros, and is just too much to make any sense of. Maybe I’m just cynical and lack the sense of style that the Times seem to have, but it seems to me that they should leave the kitty and caboodle bullshit to bloggers and other non-mainstream media. It doesn’t do them justice.
