Feline Phenomena
Take a look at the picture above. No, take another look; give it a long hard stare. What are you feeling? If you’re feeling somewhat nonplussed and greet my question with a shrug of the shoulders, then perhaps you have been desensitised to the feline phenomena that is sweeping cyberspace. In case you didn’t know, you are witnessing first hand, the joys of “cat breading” and no, I haven’t misspelt ‘breeding’ but am referencing to a major player in the hot cat crazes of the moment. It is highly likely that you thought nothing of it, never questioning why that cute little pussy cat has a baked good around its noggin.
Cat ‘stuff’’ is hard to avoid at the moment, having flooded the online world with pictures of space cats, fat cats and just plain old fluffy cats. My question is, since when are pictures of cats with a slice of bread around their head normal and/or entertaining? Perhaps it is a result of the numbing of today’s youth’s minds brought on by the increasingly inane and purposeless content on the World Wide Web. Whatever it is, be it a backlash or simply a trend, it is here to stay, with online communities growing steadily and “trending” cat pictures a dime a dozen.
A website from which a lot can be gathered from its name alone is icanhazcheeseburger.com, an oldie but a goodie, gathering snaps of cats doing anything unextraordinary and slapping a funny quote on it. Perhaps you could call this website the godfather of the cat craze or maybe more fittingly, the devil from which other websites such as Roflcat and applications Cat Wang and Catpaint have spawned.
What is Cat Wang I hear you ask? It is a Tumblr photo craze stemming from its iPhone application that allows you to cut, paste and go wild with a variety of cat heads and various body parts and replace them with your own. Yet although I am here professing how banal and one dimensional the application is, I have it on my phone. Alas, I succumbed.
Maybe the cat trend is contagious; catching like measles or chickenpox. I just can’t help but giggle at the Rofl cat website’s pics and now when I go near a loaf of bread I get this strange urge to put my cats face through it. That theory would explain a lot as well as accounting for my friends’ unexplained madness i.e. copious feline related instagram photos and facebook wall posts. Or perhaps my friends and I have boring lives and have nothing more interesting to photograph than our four-legged in house models — usually sleeping which makes for a great still life subject.
YouTube sensation of the four-legged Japanese kind Maru Maru is perhaps the most wholesome, cuddly and seemingly intelligent cat on the net. For some strange reason I feel a calming sensation come over me when watching any of his two hundred video uploads, including “Maru Maru Playing with a Box” and “Maru Maru Eating Grass”. Then five minutes pass and I think to myself, ‘I’ll never get those minutes back’! Maybe thats what the last fourteen million, twenty one thousand people thought, but my gut says no, there must be return viewers and perhaps even a thriving fan base to rival that of the ‘Biebinators’.
Whatever it is, I am truly perplexed. How could anyone get excited about watching… Ooooh! Maru Maru just uploaded a new one; “Maru Maru plays in rubbish bin”!
