"Oh my, they oppended nuther sealz there wuz big ground shaky. Teh sunz got all darky and teh moonz wuz bluudy." (Revelation 6)
And that's how the world will end . . . for cats, anyway, according to a translated passage from the Book of Revelation at Lolcatbible.com.
Sure, the Internet has more than proven itself as an invaluable tool for research, communication and business. Still, sometimes the best features of the Web are the most banal -- namely those that let you kill time online while at work or school. Perhaps no other online project of the moment is greater testament to this than the Lolcat Bible Translation Project ( www.lolcatbible.com).
Thanks to thousands of slacking office workers, procrastinating students and cat lovers worldwide with fast DSL connections at the ready, over 30% of both the New Testament and Old Testament have been translated into "lolcat" speak, a.k.a. "lolspeak." It's based on the popular Internet meme and subsequent diversionary website Lolcat.com (and, lately, the even more popular Icanhascheezburger.com), where users upload pictures of their pets with embedded words in a "cute" cat-speak (example: "um, hai, yur home early!").
And while the Bible has been translated before into Net-bred English variants (most notably an ebonics version of the Good Book), the Lolcat Bible Translation Project aims to be the first Bible a cute kitten might comprehend.
"To translate the lolcat Bible right, you have to put it in terms of what a cat would understand," said 28-year-old UC Irvine graduate student Ramie Becker, who just started working on Ezekiel 17. "So if you are trying to translate a passage that talks about tents in the desert, a cat has probably never seen that . . . but a cat has seen, like, a sofa."
The results of passages already translated into lolcat are hilarious to those familiar with the pidgin language, which is rife with intentional misspellings and syntax errors. To wit, the entry for Genesis I reads: "Oh hai. In teh beginnin Ceiling Cat maded teh skiez An da Urfs, but he did not eated dem. Da Urfs no had shapez An haded dark face, An Ceiling Cat rode invisible bike over teh waterz."
This, of course, makes little sense to those unfamiliar with the idiomatic expressions and iconic cat pictures that circulate online and are known to lolcat freaks nationwide.
