entirely safe and fun

In the Internet’s fastest-working meme labs — places like 4chan, fark, Something Awful, YTMND, etc — a phenomenon has grown up of adding captions to (typically) animal pictures, often featuring Vazquez-esque tortured syntax and spelling for added humor value (”for the lolz,” one might say). The archetypal image of this type is certainly the O RLY? owl.

But the greatest consumer of captioned animal images appears to be Caturday — at least, this is what they tell me, as I have no plan of going anywhere near the place — which calls for captioned cat images, and so I believe it is fair to adopt the world “lolcat” to describe the class. It is the tag that the new-as-of-this-year blog I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER? has come to apply, I think most fittingly. What a great word! It is officially my Favorite New Word of 2007 So Far.

Also, kitten.

The lovely Punam is currently reading the Book Whose Name We Shall Not Speak. The title may have something to do with a written character, which is deep red, but beyond this I can say no more, as I value my safety and the soundness of my mind. To do any more than hint at the Book’s True Name — and especially to speak Its dread title aloud — might attract Its fell attentions. The rites to appease It, once It has been aroused, are inconvenient at best, dangerous at worst. The author, the “Mad Puritan” Nathaniel Hawthorne, travestied his own fine short story, “The Minister’s Black Veil,” for elements of the plot, and that reckless act may have cost him his life fourteen short years later.

I suspect that most who read the Awful Book do so only when required, usually in high school. Punam, encountering It outside of that context, is able to keep Its power in check by laughing at It regularly, and It is withering under her dismissive reading eye. As she reads each leaf in her 1939 paperback edition, it crumbles and falls away from the binding; her ministrations have tramsmuted It from a Volume Entire into a Pile of Pages. The Book repels all but the staunchest reader, but Punam is simply too mickle a sorceress for even Its sanity-blasting revelations.

Alert Snoop:

• Addressing a dignitary as “His hizzoner”
• “euphizonious”
• “gazizzetteer”
• “homizeostatic” (and “hizomeostatic”)
• “trivizia” (especially “getting our trivizia on”)
• “televizzle“
• “cizelly” (but not *”cizell phone”)
• “the hizzouse” and being in it

Gregg Easterbrook’s excellent football analysis column Tuesday Morning Quarterback has returned to espn.com, and this season’s first, second, and third installations are up. Writing on the (recently resurrected) plastic.com, I’ve called TMQ the only column of its type which possesses literary merit. Easterbrook is funny, well-read and does not shy from doing his research, and his work answers the question of what a scholar would have to say about the least beautiful game.

His return is a little surprising, though, considering the firestorm he kicked up with his ill-considered comments in his now-defunct blog back in 2003. The parent company of espn.com, Disney, booted him when he criticized Disney executives Michael Eisner and Harvey Weinstein in a jeremiad which some perceived as anti-Semitic. After a short hiatus, Easterbrook re-pitched the TMQ tent at nfl.com (archive), and apparently enough time has gone by for his work to be judged again on its own purely footbally merits.

At any rate, I had been waiting for a new TMQ, checking in at nfl.com for the last couple of weeks, when I stumbled upon the column in its new home completely by accident. I figured I’d give Google one more path pointing to Easterbrook’s recent change of address.