Salutations

Welcome to small beer: your source for all things trivial.

Each week, I will provide you with content you'll wish you could ferment and distill into a tasty jar of moonshine: viral videos and images, links to fascinating articles and social commentary. I will also answer reader e-mail--if I ever get any (jhoffmann@ingnews.com).

Let's start this off with one of my favorite sources of mindless entertainment.



They're called lolcats (sometimes lolcatz). The one shown above is relatively safe. (This is something you need to ease into.) But my face and ribs hurt after laughing at some lolcats.

The concept is simple: Take a picture of a cat (or an animal of your choice) doing something "cute" or unusual and add a grammatically incorrect caption in Impact font. I have yet to make one of my own. But if I do, I'll post it here first.

For a primer on the history of lolcats, visit this site. (I don't normally endorse wikipedia, but the entry seems accurate.)

Here is a link to my favorite lolcats site. It has provided me with at least two hours of entertainment in the past few weeks.

That's all for now.

Check back soon.