Cat meme
A cat meme (French: mime) is a interwebs phena phemone phenonnonon thing involving felines. The animals are depicted with humorous expressions or in humorous poses, accompanied by a supposedly humorous caption. Cat memes began with the first glimmerings of the online world when a US soldier at a one-man radar station sent a picture of his cat’s butt as a radar image to his Soviet radar defense counterpart stationed at a Siberian gulag. While this exchange resulted in the nuclear[1] annihilation[2] of Saskatchewan, Canada and nearly started World War III, similar occurrences continued to pop up from time to time.
It was only when Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska conceived of tha interwebs, also known as the Worm White Webz, as a series of tubes, later realized by Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee, did the idea of cat memes really catch on. It was Tipper Gore’s fervent efforts to install content about prawns instead of rock music that caused the interwebs to rocket into the public consciousness and take cat pictures along with it. Teh intertubez is now estimated to be 30% cat meme and 69% prawn.[citation needed]
Origins[edit]
Marcel Moreso[edit]
Little is known about his early life[3] except that he did have a mother and a father.[citation needed] Moreso was raised in a strict home environment where he was seldom allowed to speak.[4] He was required to wear a beret (French: beaniée) every day. As he was never was taught to tie his shoes, he always wore slippers.
As a callow[5] youth, Marcel watched American movies and discovered a spiritual comrade and idol in Harpo Marx. That inspired Moreso to a life of music, also similarly influenced by involving his own name. So in parks and on streetcorners, he would sing The Marcels’ Blue Moon over and over and over and over and over and over.[6][7][8] This led to conflicts with neighbors[9], the police, Coco Chanel, Fernandel, Jacques Brel, Bonne Belle, Melle Mel and countless organ grinders as well as their enraged monkeys.
When discovered singing at the Tour Eiffel,[10] Moreso was pursued by gendarmes and angry Hermès èmployéés waving baguettes. He jumped in and swam across the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River to escape them, which most people thought was in Seine.[11] When he reached the other side, he found that the noxious chemical soup turned his face a chalky white. His vocal chords had also been destroyed. Even worse, his best pair of pants had shrunk. Moreso gesticulated wildly at passerbys to get help.[12] Seeing this, a bemused Jean-Paul Sartre, on his way to a Monty Python performance, pressed a 10 centime coin[13] into Moreso’s hand.
A grateful Moreso gave him a deep theatrical bow, and eventually set up performing for spare change outside the Marché aux Puces de St. Oo-Ah.[14] That led to an appearance on French television’s Le Shew de Dead Sullivan. And the rest is history, with mime entering worldwide popular culture rather than being limited to use by people stuck behind malfunctioning automatic glass doors.
Unfortunately, this resulted in relentless mobs of identically-dressed copycats terrorizing humanity in parks and public places. Their proliferation inspired "open carry" gun laws in 25 US states and led West Eastchester, New York to convert "Whack a Snake Day" into "Stomp a Mime Day". In Bali, tourism-destroying mimes are rounded up once a year and humanely destroyed by flinging them into an active volcano.[15]
The cats take over[edit]
As human mimes were driven off to remote islands and the mountainous regions of Barsoom, feral cats replaced them, having watched them for years.[16] The animals would be seen pulling imaginary ropes and presenting imaginary flowers to women. Feral cats would be rewarded with treats, sometimes allowing them to fully grow to 60 meters[17] or more in length as a result.[18] Those rewarded with spare change went on to launch many companies that would crash in the dot com bust.[19]
With the growing use of portable devices like the iFoam, humans would take pictures of the mime cats. They would sometimes add captions to the images. This was limited to those few who knew how to write and read, which in turn limited the audience for such pictures. This did not seem to matter much, as people ignore text and only look at pictures.
These pictures then started going viral in 1999. That is, they were spread by contagious animals secretly using people’s phones which in turn infected human brains.[20] While not fatal and actually providing some protection from a zombie apocalypse, human brain size decreased 22%. [21] This did not affect the centers that stored cat images. Further, at some point, mime became corrupted into mEEm which itself became today’s meme.[22]
Popular cat memes[edit]
I can haz cheezburger?[edit]
In 1975, Oxfam used a publicity photo from the movie Young Frankenstein to publicize world hunger. However, this backfired since no donations resulted and actor Marty Feldman received thousands of cheeseburgers through the mail from around the world. The cheeseburgers were confiscated by the movie studio who donated them to the Indigent Geezer Washed-Up Actors Home located in Death Valley. The resultant food poisoning deaths then opened up many spots for new residents and relatives of studio executives. So there was a happy ending to the tale.
Over 30 years later, two loaded guys took a picture of their equally stoned cat. Instead of sending friends the Marty Feldman picture, they accidentally sent the cat photo with the Feldman caption. The Mother of All Cat Memes was born. With this image spreading like wildfire online, the FBI (Feral Bureau of Instigation) sent its best minds to work on the phenomenon. The team that was chosen included the crack Unabomber profiling team,[23], the Ruby Ridge strategy group and Trainspotting’s Sherlock Holmes. After over 4 years of work, The code was finally broken:
- I = one
- can = Canadian
- haz = hazmat, or hazardous materials
- cheezburger = code for Chief Justice Warren Burger[24]
Therefore, the FBI is now searching for a group of 257 Sufi vegetarians from Lichtenstein intent on kidnapping Fab Morvan of Milli Vanilli.[25]
Sealing cat[edit]
While once popular fare for dinnertime TV viewing, an increasingly large segment of the public became disturbed by the clubbing and skinning of live seals, especially baby ones. The Louisville Slugger Corp. then devised a plan to train cats to club the seals. After many hours of Whack-a-Mole[26] at the local arcade, the newly created elite squad of sealing cats were judged ready and were flown to the Arctic.
TV viewers could then no longer resist watching cute animals killing other cute animals, as they had been brainwashed by David Attenborough[27] that this was the natural order of things. Animal lovers now buy up all the baby seal slippers and fur-lined coats produced each year, even tolerating residual bloodstains and the occasional post-mortem twitching and squirming of the skins.
Seal blood snowcones became tremendously popular after the sealing cats were seen grooming themselves after dispatching a group of seals. Ordering a snowcone "sealing cat style" involves standing in a bucket of shaved ice and being covered in seal blood, which is then licked off.
Sealing cats' off-seasons are spent in Hawaii, where they beat rugs, crack Macadamia nuts and the occasional coconut or Primo Warrior skull. Still, they remain ready for any task. Sealing cats were regarded as heroes when released into Attica State Prison during a general riot there. Airdropped shipments of aluminum baseball bats proved crucial, and the sealing cats proved adaptable even though they prefer hickory or ash bats.
They have become a fixture on TV. Sealing Cat Ambush is a highly-rated reality show, sponsored by Kaiser Permanente, where the critters meet and greet nursery school children in their own signature way. Sealing cats will be featured in an upcoming All-Star Game Home Run Derby. Mittens "Tha Killa" recently won The Voice competition despite only knowing the "Meow Mix" theme song. Hundreds of sealing cats are also nowadays seen battling innocent bystanders during broadcasts of Occupy protests and G20 summit meetings.
Lawn cat[edit]
One day in 1930 when theoretical physicist Erwin Schröddetwiett was out time traveling, his cat Rudolf grew tired of sitting in a box waiting for an experiment to end. Being 3/4 Swiss, the cat surveyed the physicist’s house and decided it needed a good cleaning.[28] The house was thoroughly dusted, dishes were washed, the floors were swept and rugs were vacuumed.[29] The housecat then went outside and washed windows, trimmed the roses and began mowing the lawn. The neighbor saw this and immediately ran over and offered Rudolf 5 marks to mow his lawn. This snowballed until the cat had a regular route, to the point where the enterprising feline hired more cats to serve his ever-growing customer base.
World War II attrition in their ranks was caused by Allied pilots mistaking mowing cats for tanks, plus the cats’ inability to tell the difference between a lawn and a minefield.[citation needed] Numbers have steadily risen so that there are now an estimated 850,000 lawn-mowing cats, both professional and hobbyist.[citation needed] German cats now have a lawnmower’s union with a 30-hour work week and enjoy full benefits including retirement. They are such a part of the German way of life that nobody there gives a second glance at cats mowing lawns.
In 1987, computer hobbyist Klaus Schmutz obtained an illegal beta copy of Kutundpastendrawundscribble-Makenpornen-Krashenkomputerscreamandwail, later to be known as Adobo Fotoflop. An early effort of his was to remove a lawnmower from a photo, leaving the cat. Thinking this quite funny[30] he sent the image to his friends[31]. His friends, thinking it was a contest,[32] all immediately drew in a lawnmower, a baby buggy or a shopping cart and sent it back, hoping to win a prize.[33]
A friend in the US, Hans Oppmister, received the photo, immediately converted it to punch cards[34] and printed it out into a giant image on long strips of green bar computer paper.[35] His bosses were not amused by this waste of time and fired him.[36] For his farewell party, his colleagues hung the image outside their 30-story headquarters where it was seen and photographed by news services. When the photo was published in a Washington paper[37] opposite the funnies page, then-President Ronald Reagan commented "Long cat is long". Thus was born the meme shot round the world, causing the collapse of the Soviet Union as well as eternal burning resentment by Captain Obvious for being beaten to the punch.
Nyan cat[edit]
It is well known that the legendary Saint Menard dogs provide fondue from pots hung from their collars to the crowds[38] at the Robert Guillaume Tell competition in Freebird,[39] Switzerland. In 1977, a small group of New York City residents decided to do the same for visitors to the Big Apple.[40].
New Yorkers Advocating Noshing (NYAN, later Nyan) decided to attach Pop Tarts to housecats and launch them at tourists that appeared to need a snack. Experiments proved that cats could be dropped from the observation deck of the Entire State Building[41] and still land on their feet with an intact Pop Tart. However, unpredictable winds could send the cats anywhere including Amish[42] country, where a cat with a Pop Tart was considered a sign of witchcraft.[43]
It was decided to limit the drops to 3 stories for the sake of accuracy. That way, 89% of all cats could be landed right on a tourist, where the cat’s claws could dig in to cushion its landing.
This charming custom was only ended in 2002 when it was found that gangstas from the hood[44] had acquired sealing cats, and used them to club and skin tourists alive so that gangs of sewer rats could use the skins to get Pop Tarts and commit holdups. There was a reported 50/50 share with the gangstas, though the latter still kept all proceeds of sales of organs to medical facilities and sales of meat to high-end gourmet cannibal restaurants in Manhattan.[45]
The Nyan Cat is often called an 8-bit meme. This refers to the number of bites needed to eat a Pop Tart, according to Sen. Stevens.
Footnotes[edit]
- ↑ NOO-kyu-ler
- ↑ kaboom
- ↑ or cared about, actually
- ↑ People yakkity yak a streak to waste your time of day/But Marcel Moreso would never speak unless he had something to say.
- ↑ callay, oh frabjous day
- ↑ Never a fan of irony, or ironing, he never sang Bobby Day’s Over and Over.
- ↑ Nor the Dave Clark 5 version.
- ↑ And not Nelly’s Over and Over, either.
- ↑ Paris was heavily populated by fans of The Silhouettes' Get a Job at this time, believing it referred to Jerry Lewis.
- ↑ made of old motorcycles like the Arc de Triumph
- ↑ This was, however, during a time when it wasn’t on fire.
- ↑ Some historians think he was asking for directions to the nearest tailor.
- ↑ current value: 10 centimes. They use Euros now. Pay attention.
- ↑ where they apparently sell things only in March in only two colors, a bland purple or a yucky green
- ↑ "He’s going back, way back, and… he’s gone!"
- ↑ Copycats imitated by ---- never mind.
- ↑ ’Mercan: 200 feet
- ↑ See Long cat
- ↑ Remember the Super Bowl ad, "We paid a million dollars to show you a chimp running around."? Cats paid for that, all in small change.
- ↑ according to polymath and bridge building expert Sen. Ted Stevens
- ↑ confirmed in MRI scans of Sen. Ted Stevens and others
- ↑ This can’t be blamed on Sen. Ted Stevens, although we’d obviously like to.
- ↑ still hard at work today trying to identify the Unabomber
- ↑ highly respected for his botched job on the Kennedy assassination report and his spineless posthumous apology to Japanese-American citizens imprisoned during World War II
- ↑ But don’t tell anyone, okay?
- ↑ not to be confused with guacamole, however similar they may be
- ↑ fifth largest after Queens
- ↑ The people of Switzerland would like to take this moment to remind you that just because that couch weighs a ton, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t clean behind it. Thank you.
- ↑ It is only American cats that are afraid of vacuums. English cats are afraid of hoovers, whatever those are.
- ↑ No, it wasn’t.
- ↑ No, they weren’t.
- ↑ No, it wasn’t.
- ↑ No, there wasn’t. And they’re still waiting.
- ↑ an ancient method of making confetti
- ↑ These were ancient methods of data storage. Nowadays, data is just given away to criminals to store.
- ↑ But not before stealing the idea and copyrighting it.
- ↑ The Midnight Globe
- ↑ and to small boys with head wounds
- ↑ Wooo!
- ↑ provide food, not put arrows through kids’ heads
- ↑ You can see the entire state from there, though the state is Rhode Island, not New York.
- ↑ Also known as the plane people, as they built wooden aircraft for cheapskates like Ryan Air.
- ↑ Pure superstition, whereas members of the Iroquois Nation rightly consider a cat popping out of a toaster holding a strawberry Pop Tart a sign of witchcraft.
- ↑ Curiously, no gangsta has ever been found on Oregon’s Mt. Hood.
- ↑ The fancy-looking ones without a sign with their name on it, those guys.