Six bucks for your cheezburger

I need to not have Firefox open up with iGoogle as my homepage. Just as I was about to finish up my problem set that was due yesterday, I was distracted by a link in one of the feeds in my iGoogle that was titled “LOLCat Bible = infinite entertainment” I am generally distracted by anything lolcat related. But this was particularly distracting because earlier this morning I had been trying to figure out a couple Christian blogs that I had been led to by another blog. This other blog I had found while searching for blogs about coffee and it has a couple interesting posts relating to coffee roasting, but it also has several entries about Christianity. On the Christianity thing, I find myself occasionally sucked into trying to understand the theological points that some Christians argue about. I find it fascinating because it often seems pointless to argue about certain theological details from an outsider perspective. Although I guess science probably seems the same way to someone looking at it from the outside.

Anyway, back to lolcats. I think the LOLCats bible project is fascinating because it has brought people together to work on a large project that is ultimately purely for entertainment and serves no practical purpose. At the same time it has some linguists discussing how this project may allow for more systematic study of lolcat pidgin.

Now my final point. The Language Log post about the LOLCats bible pointed  me to another post about anti-humor. Reading this post settled an issue that has been bugging me for several years. The summer before I started at UC Berkeley I went to a summer training camp for the Cal Band. A couple of the older members of the drumline kept telling jokes the whole weekend that had something to do with penguins and then ended with the line “six bucks!” At the time I was baffled by the jokes. It was frustrating to me. I couldn’t tell who was in on the jokes. Some people would laugh, but I wasn’t sure if they were pretending to get it or if they really understood the jokes. The whole thing dragged on for a few months with people photoshopping images of penguins in a supermarket background in which the price being displayed on the cash register is $6.00. Anyway, I can now put this issue to rest with the realization that I was a victim of anti-humor.