I'm completely fascinated by icanhascheezburger.com. I must visit the homepage, no joking, at least 10 times during the day -- anytime I'm waiting for some code to run, waiting for something to build, taking a break, eating lunch -- basically anytime I have a free cycle during the day, I'm looking at that damn site!

If you know me at all, you know that I often update my gmail status message with my current favorite lolcat. Most of them suck -- which you'd think would make me check the site less, not more, but I think every time I see a sucky one, I think to myself -- a good one is on its way, it has to be! My current favorite:

(click to see full size)

My son today said to me: "'god is your problem?' Aren't you going to offend aunt Jess?" (my status message says "god is your problem" and links to that lolcat.) You know, as is, ooohhhhh, you haz a ceiling cat....that's why you haz problums. Get rid of the ceiling cat, you'll be fine.

I took a poll of my friends once and asked them if any of them were as obsessed with that site as I was. Three male, three female. Two of the guys weren't even interested. One of them gets a kick out of lolcats, but answered "No" to 3 out of 4 questions. One of the girls didn't know what icanhascheezburger.com was, but the other two answered yes to most of my questions. Mabye it's cause the site is full of adorable, anthropomorphized little animals. The site literally makes me want to get a cat -- sometimes it makes me go browse real-life kitten listings and I fantasize about taking photos of it and making up cute little captions.

The whole lolcat meme is fascinating to me. I think especially because it's streaming into real life now. In San Francisco, they painted a lolcat mural, and then there's this flier that's been going around for a while now: Mising lolcat; responds to "cheezburger". My girlfriend (the one above who didn't know what icanhascheezburger even was!) saw that flier in Bernal Heights the other day and took a photo of it for me!

What is it about being able to make fun of the world and current events, and god and the devil, and everything in between with cats and dogs and hamsters and inanimate objects with faces that we all find so fascinating? It just must be true -- no one can resist the cute.