This is a bi-weekly column about microcelebrities - the often accidental stars of the viral videos and jpegs crowding our inboxes.
It had to happen: Like the Titanic and the iceberg, the two were fated to meet under dire circumstances.
In one corner was the iconic image of the new economy: Traders assuming the position, head in hands, despairing.
In the other corner, LOLcats. Images of cats superimposed with such catchphrases as DO NOT WANT and I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER.
Two visual tropes, each with its own storied past, on a collision course.
Most of us are familiar with the failing economy. LOLcats may need a bit more explanation.
The slightly enigmatic and grammatically distinctive cat macros drifted into our consciousness some time in 2005. No one can pinpoint a specific source; it was a collective movement, a dialogue between website contributors riffing on each other's weird little jokes.
The appeal of the resulting captioned photos was immense. Tribute website I Can Has Cheezburger was started January of 2007, inviting readers to create and post their own LOLcats. The site was a mad success: It recently sold for $2-million.
LOL-ness began to bleed into other realms. Community website Fark began a hugely popular LOLpresidents thread; LOLrus, a walrus that appeared on I Can Has Cheezburger, got its own Web page. Some loony on Wikipedia is translating the Bible into LOL speak.
Meanwhile, as people continued to stick type onto photos of kitties, Rome (or perhaps I should say Washington) burned.
Alyx Kaczuwka, a Web analyst in Winter Park, Fla., and a keen market observer, got a whiff of trouble in January. When Ben Bernanke first started cutting interest rates and the market "rallied mindlessly," as she puts it, Ms. Kaczuwka found a photo of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board chief, captioned it UR RATE IS BETTERS NOW, then e-mailed it to a friend as a joke.
Shortly after, thinking there might be an audience for this kind of thing, she launched LOLfed.com, "LOL captions stuck onto the federal reserve chairman," as she describes it. "It expanded a little bit from that."
Her often hilarious take on the economy (she blogs as well as posting graphics) has earned her a readership of thousands. "Maybe half are financial-industry professionals and half are people who are interested in what is going on in the economy but tired of inscrutable, dry, jargon-filled financial news," she says.
A recent post features a picture of the irresistibly unphotogenic Alan Greenspan against the backdrop of a giant breaker, captioned "ur tsunami of fail has arrived" and the headline OMG HOW MUCH FAIL CAN ONE DAY POSSIBLY HAVE.
"Greenspan today came out and admitted that the free markets' failure to self-regulate makes him a sad panda," blogged Ms. Kaczuwka, "and that ... there is a 'tsunami' upon us."
And then there was her iconic GO CRY EMO BANKER image accompanying her report on the Lehman Brothers' unravelling.
The proliferation of media shots of overly expressive traders has proved too tempting to other LOL-minded beings. Ms. Kaczuwka has been joined in the field by the website Sad Guys on Trading Floors, which has a distinctly LOL flavour (or should I say, flavr), and a LOLtraders thread on LiveJournal.
It seems that, as a national concern, you haven't arrived until you've been LOL'd. Yale University researched the LOLcats phenomenon in January of this year; they say it has to do with evolutionary adaptation.
David Weinberger, a fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society, believes the LOL meme "propagates itself not simply because of its cleverness, spurring people to send examples around in e-mail. Rather, it spreads because it's an invitation to creativity. Anyone and everyone can contribute." It is, he says, a rebuttal to mass culture that's been marketed to us and shoved down our throats.
"Some of them," he adds, "are also damn funny."