The Power of Cats

If there's one thing the internet loves, it's cat-related absurdity. People can't get enough of cats: videos of cats are some of the most viral on the Web, and ICanHasCheezburger, a blog devoted to "lolcats" (pictures of cats in odd situations with badly-written captions) got so popular so quickly that it was bought out for
$2 million before it was a year old. The lolcat craze has even spawned a pidgin language, as the the CEO of ICanHasCheezburger explained in this interview in October.
Some of these are legitimately clever:

while others go to show that any random juxtaposition of cat and text will probably end up amusing somebody:

An iPhone application released last week capitalizes on this cat infatuation in about the most effortless way possible: CatPaint lets you take any of 8 cat photos and tack them at random onto your existing photos. It's simple, it's ludicrous, it costs $0.99, and it has the entire tech world self-consciously thrilled. The application earned mention in articles and blog posts on Cnet, Wired, Gizmodo and many more usually-sophisticated sites. Lex Friedman, on Macworld.com, captures the general mood of these writeups: "CatPaint lets you e-mail your be-kittened masterpieces to your soon-to-be-ex-friends, or just save them to your camera roll in private shame."

They may not want to admit it, but even the most jaded techies are at least a little bit amused by the visual non sequitur of a cat--whether it be a leaping cat, an obese cat, or just a plain old cat sitting doing nothing--into an otherwise serious photo.

The internet can be a scary place. When we're not busy solving crimes or trying to avoid identity theft, I'm glad we can still find simple pleasure in one of mankind's most ancient pastimes--laughing at animals for not being like us. And as our world becomes more ordered, more mechanical, more copy-and-paste-able, I suspect that cats with their fat and fur and predatory instincts will only get more hilarious.

I can't think of a better way to end this post than with yet another ridiculous cat picture. So here's yet another ridiculous cat picture.

Is Amazon the new Wal-Mart?

Of this I'm certain: staying-home-and-clicking-on-things is the new going-to-an-actual-store. What's not to love Amazon.com, a marketplace that has a seemingly infinite selection, with reduced prices on essentially everything, and doesn't require you to actually look for a darn thing? If you shop there a few times, it even starts telling you what to buy.

Amazon started as a simple online bookstore, but it rapidly expanded and now sells, as far as I can tell, literally everything. Electronics. Diapers. Air horns. Nail polish. Hot sauce. If you can put it in a box, they'll sell it to you. Their inventory isn't limited by the physical constraints that an actual four-walls-and-a-glass-door store has to deal with. And by allowing small retailers (as small as one guy who wants to sell one book) to open marketplaces and sell their used or new stuff through Amazon, they're even encroaching on the territory of internet giants like eBay.

I'd say Amazon has definitely become the Wal-Mart of the internet. But as the New York Times reported this week, Amazon's popularity is also starting to take a toll on stores based in physical reality. That means small retailers--independent bookstores, sports equipment stores, and other specialized retailers--but that's nothing new. Now, Amazon and Wal-Mart are getting into blatant price wars--and Amazon's keeping up.

Given that the two retail realms, let's call them he visceral and the ethereal (get it? Ether-real? Like ethernet? Oh, never mind...), have comparable prices, there are all the obvious reasons of convenience and privacy and selection to sway a shopper toward ethereal retail.

But there's another that isn't getting talked about so much, which is that Wal-Mart just isn't very, you know, classy. People are blaming everything on Wal-Mart these days, from slave labor to soulless capitalism, and it's distinctly untrendy to actually shop there. But somehow Amazon, which relies many of the same business strategies, has escaped the spotlight in most of those tirades.

And besides that, when the increasingly terrifying holiday season rolls around, with Black Friday specials accompanied by twelve-hour queues and occasional tramplings, where would you rather be--here:

 or here:

...?

I'm definitely biased on this subject, but Amazon seems to be in the more promising position here. Before long, Amazon won't be the new Wal-Mart--Wal-Mart will be the old Amazon.

Kids these days...

One of City Pages' top stories this week: a group of Somali teenagers posted a video on Youtube of themselves carousing around the Minneapolis/ St. Paul area, pushing over bicyclists and tormenting pedestrians. The video was discovered by people-with-power and the boys are now being prosecuted.


I might think twice about posting the video here, except that it's, well, pretty tame:

Prank video via City Pages
Uploaded by citypages

The video was posted on the City Pages Web site, covered on kare11, and showed up and various other public forums, all of which generally approach the issue of race with a respectable, journalistic sense of political correctness. But the community reaction has been, simply put, weird. The comments are moderated, and since I first read the message boards most of the blatantly racist and defamatory posts have been removed. But "Mike" here sums up the sentiments of many of the comments:
          Mike says:
          Normal behaving for somali f***s, only pirates and other kind
          of criminals from there, nothing new.
It was bewildering to me, and considerably more disturbing than any content of that video, how quick people were to pin this incident on racial inferiority or some sort of lack of American-ness. I can hardly think of anything more American than a crowd of restless teenagers doing stupid and disruptive things for their friends' amusement. How popular was Jackass?

Rather than talking about "Somali f***s," I think we should be talking about kids these days, kids and their internets.

You know what they say: it's only a crime if you get caught. These kids were acting like jerks, no question there, and having so publicly announced their actions I see no reason why they shouldn't be prosecuted. Still, no one was seriously hurt, no property damaged--ultimately, nothing they did was serious enough that anyone would have bothered to track them down and lock them up.

Their biggest mistake was putting the whole thing on the internet. But if not for that public forum, I sincerely doubt they would have done any of this in the first place. Their actions belong to the ever-growing category of crimes that have no purpose without an audience.

Youtube and its kin, sites that allow people to upload videos for all the world to see, have played host to thousands of videos of crimes (or just unpleasant but un-litigable behavior) of more or less violent nature. Quite a few crimes have been solved with the help of video and other information sharing on the internet.

But it's a double-edged sword: there have been plenty of crimes committed with the express purpose of posting the results on the internet. Remember Victoria Lindsay, kidnapped and beaten by a group of indignant friends who wanted to humiliate her by posting the assault on MySpace? How about Bum Fights, a veritable franchise revolving around the rather savage harassment of homeless people?

The Twin Cities assault crew are responsible for their own actions, but they aren't responsible for the culture of assault-as-entertainment.

I'm just wondering when teenagers are going to start figuring out that posting videos of yourself involved in criminal activity on the Web gets you arrested.