Roadblock Blog

We Can Has Lolblocks?

The internets — which, contrary to the assertions of the legendary Road(to nowhere)block Republican, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, are neither a big truck or a series of tubes — are the perfect place for passing memes to meet, mash-up, and propagate these days. In this regard they are not entirely dissimilar from people who hang around in Georgetown singles bars. This is why they are so easy and so popular when extended to politicians. (The memes are, that is, not the people who hang around in Georgetown singles bars. Although, come to think of it…)

Anyway, those pesky internets have helped a number of pop-cultural memes to explode from in-group to overused status in a relatively short time. And, not surprisingly, when memes collide there will inevitably be political pieces left lying around afterwards. Sometimes this happens when the pop-cult memes themselves are based on politics right from the start, such as that by-now infamous Series of Tubes comment.

Other times the pop-cult memes come in from the cold and then attach themselves to politicians instead, much like K Street lobbyists and ethics scandals do with Republicans. That happened a few years back with the All Your Base Are Belong to Us phenomenon, and then again several years later with Snakes On A Plane (a movie that was so obviously meme-oriented even before it was released that followup multi-meme mash-ups like All Your Snakes were as predictably inevitable then as GOP filibusters are now.)

One of the more recent pop-cultural meme mash-up phenomena is the explosion of lolcats. (No, we don’t mean that literally. So put down that phone and leave the ASPCA out of this, please.) As I Can Has Cheezburger?, the site perched at the virtual crossroads of that truck full of intertubes when it comes to lolcats, explains it:

Some people call pictures of cats with funny/weird or many other derived types of captions — lolcats or cat macros. The practice of captioning, specifically, cats started many years ago on anonymous forums, most prominently called the *chans. Supposedly, the practice of posting and the actual type of these images was termed "Caturday.”

This word has since detached from its original context, grown, and evolved into different terms like lolcats, lolrus, loldog and splintered into varying sub-memes and sub-sub-memes which employ different grammatical patterns, different contexts, and sometimes even merges memes.

The meme continues to evolve into many completely tangential and unrelated memes: lolbrarians, lolbees, lolpresidents (my favorite being LOLcode). A new LOL-spinoff is created every week. This is happening throughout the internet by people who are having fun, and being creative, by taking a meme (idea) and applying it in new and creative ways.

A comprehensive, educational, illustrative, hysterically funny, and totally irreverent guide to the finer points of the lolcats-to-lolpresidents crossover mash-up movement is posted in — fair warning here, don’t blame us for the uncouth language some people might choose to use on certain other websites, it’s not our fault their mamas didn’t raise them right, harrumph harrumph — this diary on Daily Kos (which itself quotes from a far more sedate Wikipedia entry on lolcats that includes lots of scholarly reference links to traditional media coverage of the phenomenon too, so you know there must be more to this than just mere truthiness, right?)

So, dear RR.com readers, here’s the deal: if you feel so inspired by all of this gratuitous political memeosity that you want to create some of your very own lolcats-type images lampooning those goshdarn Roadblock Republicans we all want so badly to get rid of in 2008, then go for it! When you’re done, post them online somewhere (on your own blog sites or on a pix-sharing site like Flickr or ImageShack) and drop a comment on this thread giving us the URL for your newly-minted lolblocks mash-ups.

We’ll take a look at what you’ve made to make sure it follows the obvious rules of the road here — no foul language, no copyright violations, no stealing other people’s stuff and claiming it’s yours, that sort of thing — and if your shiny new lolblocks make the cut, we’ll publish the links to them here so everybody can dig and comment on how creatively snarky they are.