In the beginning, there was O RLY? Next came LOLCATS, followed by LOLGAY, then LOLCATS v2.0, and a GAYCATLOLS thrown in for good measure—all harebrained and grammatically unsound but generally harmless anthropomorphisms of snowy owls, house cats, and gay people. LOLCATS, in fact, is a delightfully light-hearted collection of cat photos and misspelled captions, punctuated, as is to be expected, by the occasional blemish of vapidity. The latest permutation of the LOL meme, however, is decidedly more transgressive. Wait, not transgressive ... just plain awful. In case you're out of the LOL loop, I'm talking about LOLDEDCATS, the product of several deranged individuals and the hateful blog heartonastick.blog-city.com. It shows—you guessed it—deceased LOLCATS.

Full disclosure: As a cat's proud cohabitant, I am particularly sensitive to the mortal plight of felines. My own relationship with the victims aside, it seems LOLDEDCATS just doesn't fly with Internet-goers in general. In an age when videos of stonings, beheadings, and bombings are posted online with chilling regularity, there remains something uniquely disturbing about a photograph of an orange tabby smeared across asphalt by a tractor trailer's treads. Could it be that some vestige of our national psyche has remained sensitive to violence—or, at least, one form of it? I would say yes, and my answer would seem to be confirmed by the fact that, while genocide and suicide bombings seem to generate little effective activism in this country, the groundswell of indignation over LOLDEDCATS recently forced its host to shutter the site. It's since been put back up, but given PETA's 1.6 million-strong membership this can only be temporary.—Alex Littlefield