For the record

I hate LOLcats, and I think they're emblematic of a crumbling society. They became popular for the same reason that the boy-band boom of Y2K happened: middle-aged women and tween-girls found common ground in tastes. That's a dangerous combination, a potent demographic coalition that has undone the promising career of Justin Guarini while promoting MOR chanteusse Kelly Clarkson, re-popularized knitting (which is not a bad thing, actually), and enabled a generation of new-emailers (young and old) to learn and re-learn bad forwarding habits.

It seems that whenever a group of people--be they 12 or be they 45--first become able to email, they play out the entire, awful, horrific evolution of the internet in their probational period of becoming (one hopes) responsible internet users. To that end, the usenet, message-board fad is an unfortunate formative period best left in the dustbin of history with Compuserve and Prodigy modem-set-up 5 1/4" floppy disks.

LOLcats are memorials to this awful time.