Dear God, the promotions people must be hard up for ideas....

I live with a pack of cats, well, I suppose the best thing I can say is that they tolerate my existance because of the food and attention that they get from me and my wife on a daily basis. and they do a great job of putting my mind at ease at certain points because of their unconditional love and support. Granted, I could do without some of the butt sniffing and other odd grooming things cats do, but that pales in comparison with what other benefits they provide.

And the Internet has put cats up on a pedestal of sorts with the invention of LOLcats. These cute pictures started appearing on the Internet 7 years ago in random places where cats are doing something cute or disturbing and it's captioned in mangled cat talk to say what they might be thinking. The most famous one is Happy Cat, who is smiling and making the eternal statement that all cats make: "I can haz cheezburger?" The fun article site, Fark.com, has a dedicated day on Saturdays for LOLcat pictures, and I can even say that a few of our cats have ended up in the grandure of LOLcats because of their antics. I won't even speak to what our cat Pilot did to a stuffed Domo-Kun when we weren't looking.

So I'm reading the sports headlines this morning, and found out that last night in the land up north, they had LOLcat day at the ball park, complete with a Happy Cat bobblehead, a special singing of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" in lolcat, and other assorted celebrations of the Internet phenomenon. Apparently, they had more prizes than tickets sold, but it was a decent sized crowd for a weeknight. I have to admit that promotions is often a thankless business, because while you work hard to fill seats with fans, if the prize is too special or in demand, you end up with customers who could care less about the sporting event and are just there for the trinket. This phenomenon often upsets the most hardcore sports fans, who have to put up with the fair-weather prize grubbing fan. The Timbers had a skate deck night this year that turned out a huge crowd, but admittedly, there was a section of the crowd that probably couldn't have told you what event was really going on that night, they just got a cool skate deck for free.

I guesss I'm just a little frustrated that corporate sporting America has taken a relatively cool phenomenon like LOLcats and turned them into a marketing ploy to sell baseball tickets. While I admit that I shouldn't be surprised because everything in our current world has a price tag associated with it, I had hoped that some fads would be just left alone and allowed to attain super status rather than jump the shark in some spectacularly inane way. I guess at least this promotion is slightly better than Roni Deutch Does Your Taxes night!