No one knows who put the first cat picture on the Internet, but they have since become an unstoppable, mutating force. The photo site Flickr is awash with cat clusters, the Random Kitten Generator finds daily converts, YouTube has an international trade in cat videos, and those are just the obvious examples. When I worked at a Web magazine in the mid-90s, we used to joke that more people uploaded pictures of their cats to their home pages than read our articles. That joke became less funny when it turned out to be true. The cat you are gazing at is known as Happycat. He or she (I'm not a cat person) is the inspiration for the Web site I Can Has Cheezburger?, which started in January. The site collects and tags examples of lolcats, i.e., laugh-out-loud cats, the latest Internet humor boomlet.