Salon.com > Jay Dixit

I can has cheezburger … and pathos?

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 12:02:00 +0000

The first time I saw a lolcat -- those funny images of felines with grammatically questionable captions -- it took me a minute to understand the joke.

"What's with the misspellings?" I wrote the friend who'd IM'd me the link. "Cats are dumb and can't spell?"

"Pretty much," my friend replied.

"And they have bad grammar?" I wrote, still processing the idea.

"Yes," he wrote. "Get it?"

I did. In fact, I couldn't stop laughing.

By now, even the most casual observers of the Internet are aware that lolcats have become a certifiable Internet phenomenon. Their flagship site, Icanhascheezburger.com, is one of Web 2.0's big success stories -- on track to top a billion page views this year -- and its content is entirely user-generated. Readers upload over 5,000 homegrown submissions every day, of which six or eight are posted on the site. And in October, the lolcats got their very own coffee table book, "I Can Has Cheezburger," published by Gotham Books.

Vigil at the Armory

Thu, 27 Sep 2001 19:00:00 +0000

It's just days after the destruction of the World Trade Center. Outside the New York State Armory on 26th Street, the wall is plastered with fliers about World Trade Center workers who are missing. The signs feature names, physical descriptions, color photos, names of employers, tower and floor numbers, home phone numbers and pleas for help. "Anyone who may have known Rich, please call us ANYTIME." "Floor 105, still hopeful family!!! Great Dad and missed soccer coach." Other signs offer hope for the families. "Hold on, help is on the way. Anything is possible when you believe."

"Come sit with us," says a woman sitting on the sidewalk and smoking a cigarette. "We can tell you about Lucy." The woman, Teresa Galdames, is looking for her cousin, Lucy Fishman. She worked on the 105th floor of World Trade Center Tower 2, as an administrative assistant for Aon Insurance. Lucy is 36 and has two children, one 3 and one 11. She was last heard from at about 8:55 a.m. on Tuesday morning, when her husband spoke with her. Teresa, Lucy's sister, Bertha Bracken, and dozens of other friends and relatives have been looking for Lucy for the past three days.

A banner day for neo-Nazis

Wed, 09 May 2001 19:30:00 +0000

Six years ago, I declared in an article for a Yale University magazine called the New Journal that "the Internet may be the best thing that has ever happened to help the struggle to spread the word of white power."

I concluded the article by referring readers to a then recently created Web site called Hatewatch, a watchdog site that indexed and linked to hate groups on the Internet in order to expose them, while also linking to sites devoted to debunking hate propaganda. Citing a statement by essayist Logan Pearsall Smith -- "How it infuriates a bigot when he is forced to drag out his dark convictions" -- Hatewatch operated on the principle that the best way to combat hate was to expose it for what it was, to fight hate speech with more speech.

So I was shocked last month to read that Hatewatch was shutting its doors. First started in 1995 by a Harvard Law School librarian named David Goldman, Hatewatch was the first major site to track online hate groups -- the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Holocaust deniers, Klansmen, black nationalists and gay bashers who saw the Internet as their chance to spread their messages to the world. It attracted incredible media coverage, helped to focus public attention, provided a reference for law enforcement and attracted 1 million visitors a year.

Designer eggs

Fri, 25 Aug 2000 19:00:00 +0000

This month the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), the nation's largest organization of fertility professionals, released a report on the increasing commodification of human egg donation. In a word, the report decreed, it has to stop. Paying donors $5,000 or more requires special justification, and paying sums above $10,000 is simply inappropriate.

Egg donation has been a burgeoning field since the '80s when the first egg donors received a scant few hundred dollars for their troubles and tissue. In recent years an increasing number of infertile couples have looked to technology to fulfill their dreams of a biological family and buyers have flocked from Canada and Europe, where the transaction is illegal. Hence, the price of eggs in America has steadily risen. Controversy finally erupted last fall when classified ads started appearing in campus papers across the country offering $50,000 for eggs from women of a particular height, athletic ability and SAT score. Then came the brouhaha over a dubious Web auction site called www.ronsangels.com that purported to sell the eggs of beautiful women to the highest bidder.