I can has frontpage tag on Althouse? Kthxbai

First, a bit of background: In the early days of the blogosphere, a lot of blogs were more like diaries, and more than a few blogs started to specialize in whatever the writer's favorite hobby happened to be. One of the bigger categories turned out to be cat blogging, which often was as simple as people posting funny pictures of their cats on their blogs. (For whatever reason, Friday became a popular day to do this.) As I said, it was popular four or five years ago, but I haven't seen a lot of it of late.

Now fast-forward to this morning: Ann Althouse, who hosts one of my favorite blogs, wrote a post this morning about khat, a plant native to East Africa and the Arabian peninsula which is often ingested by chewing on its leaves, which contain a stimulant similar to amphetamines. It's illegal in many countries, including the USA, but a group of immigrants from places like Ethiopia, Somalia and Yemen are decrying this illegality, citing "cultural differences."

It's a great discussion (which I encourage you to read), but I was in a playful mood this morning, so I tossed out the following comment in that thread: "I thought khat-blogging had kind of gone out of style lately."

When I came back from lunch, I found that Althouse wrote a new post around the theme, encouraging readers to make lolcat pictures of their own and email them to her. (What's a lolcat? This. Where's the best site to see lots of them? Here. And how do you make one of your own? This way. And I should point out that an Althouse post from 2007 is what turned me onto lolcats in the first place.)

Incidentally, the lol-khat connection had occurred to me as I was writing the above comment, as Althouse had written "You're not supposed to notice that the actual scene is nothing more than some men lolling about having a drug-fueled argument" in the original post, but I didn't have time to comment on that before leaving for lunch.

Anyway, I decided to make a lolcat myself:


(This would also make the frontpage of the Althouse post. And it took a bit of looking to find a "kitteh" with a tag on it to go with my intended caption.)

Althouse has been generous of late in rewarding commenters who say something witty or noteworthy with frontpaging (where a comment gets quoted in an update to the main post) and tags (the things you see at the bottom of the post), so it was cool to get my very first set of those. After all, her blog gets nearly 17,000 visitors a day, so it's no small peanuts to be recognized.

Now I just need to work on getting an Instalanche sometime...