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...

Is Mah Birfday; Where R Sleep?

I'm back home now, after an interesting night of commercial aviation.

It was already going to be a late night to begin with, as we were scheduled to land at around 11 p.m. But after three flight delays and five (count 'em) gate changes at O'Hare, we finally touched down around one in the morning. Add up the usual business of getting luggage, shuttling out to the Back Forty where I parked, and driving home, and I graced the doorstep of Casa de Kev a little after two.

I've never started a new year of life in the air before (and the near-roller coaster moments before landing made things interesting), and it hasn't seemed quite like a "holiday" yet, as summer teaching started at nine this morning. There'll probably be some good naptime in the afternoon, as Tuesdays haven't filled up yet, though I still have quite a bit of catching up to do.

I'll delay the wrap-up of the Vermont trip until tomorrow.

(As for the title of this post, I once again link to this hilarious lolcat that was posted last year, a day before "mah birfday" took place.)

For Some People, Today Is LIke Christmas in June

But not for me. It's not that I don't want a new iPhone; of course I do. But I'm not El Techno Geek Supremo enough to have to have it on the first day (and besides, as someone else said in the comments to the lolcat picture in the first link above, "I has teh poor" this time of year).

Actually, the truth of the matter is this: I have a six-month-old video iPod, a perfectly good RAZR (the pictures from which have been splashed over this blog recently) and thirteen months left on my cellular contract, so (to quote the old movie), Kevin can wait; whether that means wait for the update or at least for the price to come down is unsure at the moment. (Hat tip for the lolcats: Althouse. I think that I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER is one of my favorite new sites of the past few weeks.

James Lileks and Brendan Loy are liveblogging the festivities surrounding the release in Minneapolis and Knoxville, respectively. Brendan even sent some blog posts by the phone. (UPDATE: And Lileks has a movie of the day's events.)

Did any Musings reader succumb to the temptation to pick this thing up on Day One?

Also, it's been said that iPhone sales translate to an avalanche of discarded electronic devices...or maybe people will just leave their old phones in their junk drawers, like I do. I have three old cell phones in there; can anybody here top that?

Politics trump technology: In Philadephia, the mayor left his place in line for an iPhone when he was berated for doing so by a passerby who asked him, "How can you sit here with 200 murders in the city [this year] already?"

This story sounds too good to be true: A guy paid $4.88 for a plasma TV at Wal-Mart. Too bad he was actually committing fraud in the process...

For gamers, it's just what the doctor ordered: The American Medical Association now says that excessive playing of video games does not constitute a formal psychiatric addiction.

In Case You Didn't Know, Today...

is mah birfday.

I really didn't know much about lolcats until yesterday; a friend has a few of them on his MySpace, but I wasn't aware that they were part of a recent Internet phenomenon. (The lolcats are cousins of sorts to the O RLY? owl, with which I'm quite familiar.)

(Hat tip to Althouse, whose post yesterday turned me onto the lolcat meme. And how odd that the cat in question was posted just one day before my actual day.)

Hall of fame: I share mah birfday with several famous people, including Prince Philip of Great Britain, Judy Garland, actress Elisabeth Shue, ice skater Tara Lipinski (who hails from Sugar Land, the current residence of my parents), Brazilian singer João Gilberto (who did the classic bossa nova recordings with Stan Getz), and quarterback-turned-sportscaster Dan Fouts.