Lolcats are sick. I think icanhascheezburger.com is not at all cute, it's disgusting and cruel. I feel horrified and angry when I look at it.

I was glancing through the recently posted blogs in Wordpress yesterday and I looked at a blog about cuteness. There was a picture of some kind of baby animal, I guess it was a puppy, and it was lying asleep on what looked like a hardwood floor, with a scarf wrapped around its neck. I'm not sure it was a puppy. The legs were too short, which tells me it was a 'breed' dog, maybe one of the unnaturally small toy dogs, and not just a normal puppy. The scarf around its neck looked like it would make the poor thing choke. I don't like tight scarves wrapped around the necks of human beings any more than I like them wrapped around the necks of baby puppies trying to sleep without dying.

Then the post mentioned something about icanhascheezburger.com being cute. I have seen several of the cat pictures from there and I am almost always disgusted and horrified. I recently saw a picture of a cat sticking its head up out of a tiny, narrow box, and it said something like 'this box not too small, i can fit in it,' ha ha, that's cute, except somebody had to pick the cat up and force it into this box - it was something it could not possibly have gotten into on its own, from the look of it. It looked like the back end of the box was closed, not open, so I can't see how the cat would have crawled into it. Maybe I should look again - maybe the box was open at both ends and the cat really did try to crawl through it on its own. However, the box had now been placed in an upright position instead of lying down, so that the cat was standing up inside the box, possibly helpless to move and get itself out. All of the pictures are in that same spirit.

I had the same reaction to something I saw on the news when I was at Peter's house a while back. It was a weather report. The guy had thought it was funny to show little pictures of cats rolled up tightly in a little blanket, helpless and immobile, wrapped like a tortilla or burrito, with a little Mexican hat on it if I recall correctly, and they showed this little burrito cat on the weather map for a few seconds as a joke, and the burrito was blowing in the wind on the map. I was horrified. All I could see was a cat that somebody had trapped and forced to be wrapped in a blanket whether it wanted to be there or not, and its legs were helpless and it could not move.

The look on its face was unhappy. You can read a cat's facial expressions the same way you read a human's facial expressions. Cats have facial expressions too. This is not a joke, I am serious, cats really do express emotions on their faces and you can read them just like humans. The cat had an expression of miserable endurance, putting up with something it didn't like at all. Is miserable endurance and helpless entrapment 'cute?' It reminds me of Guantanamo torturers again. It is not at all cute and funny. All of the icanhascheezburger pictures look like that to me - torture, not cuteness.

Cats in natural, comfortable positions are cute. When they do something funny of their own free will, it's cute. When they are wearing a happy facial expression or a puzzled facial expression or some other expression that does not signify pain and misery and terror, they are cute. When they are NOT trapped tightly in unnatural clothing that some human has forced on them, they're cute.