Welcome to Thatz Not Okay, a regular column in which I school inquiring readers on what is and is not okay. Please send your questions to caity.weaver@gawker.com with the subject "Thatz Not Okay."

A certain demographic of potential Obama voters recently received yet another email from the president's campaign reminding them to go vote (preferably early).

What a day for News Corp: First Rupert Murdoch is ruled by Members of Parliament to be unfit to run a major international company; then, The Sun publishes a press-halting exposé on the emerging trend of "wacky cat pics" allegedly "wowing the web."

Memes are often seen as the lowest form of culture, which is true. But academics, advertisers and media folk have started to seriously examine lolcats and the like—and they're making tons of money doing it.

After "rather lengthy negotiations" to sell pictures for captioning by the users of I Can Haz Cheezburger, the Associated Press pulled out, citing concerns over "journalistic integrity." Replied the Cheezburger Network, "Oh plz, dey juss wanted moar moneys."

The I Can Haz Cheezburger guy, Ben Huh, got an AdAge profile. They've got 21 full-time employees, 30 blogs, and 11.5M visitors a month. They were profitable in their first quarter "almost entirely via ad networks and Google AdSense." [AdAge]

Clearly, the online ad market is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions. Old Testament, wrath of God type stuff: Dogster and LOLcats-based I Can Has Cheezburger are now selling ads together, per a new agreement. Next up: Mass hysteria.

30 Million Americans (14%) 16 or older are illiterate. Which kinda makes reading Twilight okay.

That's it from us today. We're taking tomorrow off and will be back up and running on Friday. Have a wonderful Christmas/Fourth Fifth Day of Hannukah/Thursday.

In an archeological dig, what is perhaps the world's first LOLcat (or a clever Photoshop job) has been discovered... in teh print! In the photo—a 1905 postcard—a kitten is wearing a dress and sitting in a high chair. This is humorous because cats do not normally wear dresses. To make it even funnier, the photo is captioned, "What's delaying my dinner?" as if the cat could speak. If we find stereopticon cards of Shiba Inu puppies, we're declaring the Internet a total rip-off. [Buzzfeed via My Cats Wear Clothes]

New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser is that degraded newspaper's usual voice of outrage, which is why she usually looks like this. But from now on we will use this photo of Peyser, in cat ears, cuddling with little "Barack Obama" at the CFA-Iams Cat Show this week. How could this be the same woman who wrote FELONIOUS BALL OF FUR DESERVED EVERY BLOW just last month? [MSG.com, Photo: Chad Batka]

A couple months ago, we LOL'd at the book proposal for the upcoming LOLcats book, I Can Has Cheezburger? Then, in a blog-to-book roundup, we declared "do not want" on the LOLcat book, explaining, "The LOLcats experience is fleeting; the site stuffed with content, and copycat sites abound." We were right about some of these blog-to-books: the rushed-to-print Stuff White People Like, for instance, sucked and did not merit a review. But! We have the LOLcats books in our hands right now, and we'd like to overturn our previous verdict of DO NOT WANT.The new book is little and cute and we want! It may not be necessary for the Internet savvy among us (like everyone reading), but it makes a cute gift for someone like your grandma who doesn't understand the Internet but probably would understand funny captioned cat-photos. In the proposal, the authors assured they wouldn't be "just slapping some lolcats on a page and calling it a book." But that's exactly what they ended up doing! It doesn't matter, though. Because today we LOL'd, and we really needed to. And that is the power of the LOLcats. Update: On the book's Amazon.com page, we noticed something very weird:

With the possible exceptions of various sarcastic asides by John Dickerson and Jack Shafer, online journal of contrarianism Slate has run like one intentionally funny piece in its 100 year history-this examination of Chuck Klosterman jacket photos by Doree-so we're not entirely sure why they keep trying. Humor is not really your bag, Slate! Today we received an ominous email from Slate's indefatigable flack: "Slate V Spoofs Lolcats: Polcats—What if Barack and Hillary Wuz Kittehs?" It might go... a little something... like this: Click to view Slate, this is the kind of idea we get at like 4:30 p.m. on a Friday and we think better of before we even finish the email pitch to Blakeley. This is apparently the kind of idea you decide to publish as an actual book so our advice is probably falling on deaf ears.

Both Time and the Wall Street Journal have run articles in the past 24 hours about 4chan, the dirty little secret site that spawns many a Web fad — LOLcats and rickrolling among them. But you don't want to start surfing 4chan yourself. It's full of sophomoric poor-taste-on-purpose posts like the above image. Moreover, posts on 4chan rarely live more than an hour. They're automatically pulled once their comment threads go idle, rather than archived. Let the kids filter it for you. Anything really good on 4chan will turn up on your screen from somewhere else.

Soon the days of just .com and .org and .net will be replaced with .whatevs and .moar as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers approved a proposal to allow the creation of unlimited domain suffixes. [WSJ] (Original photo by Lucie Provencher)

In San Francisco, the land where Internet memes are incarnate, a LOLcat photo has become a giant mural (note to self: are there small murals? investigate). Big photo below. [Laughing Squid]

Everyone has a little online jackass in them; some of us add people on Facebook too soon, some of us beg for votes on Digg, some make white whines on Twitter. But these behaviors can lead to more annoying habits, like constantly bugging people to blog you, getting hooked on Yelp, or writing drug metaphors. Thank god online jackassery can be summed up in a condescending online quiz. Take it below! Maybe you're a Carrie.

If everyone's getting a book deal for their blog, why aren't you? Mostly because your writing hasn't gone anywhere better than a Gawker comment thread, but also because you haven't followed these three steps (note: not a joke article! Real advice inside) to getting a blog book deal. Short version: Start a blog that's short and sweet and high-concept, spread it on Tumblr and LiveJournal, send it to Gawker, and call Kate Lee.

Seattle-based Pet Holdings, the company that runs the photo-blog I Can Has Cheezburger, posted a job listing on Monday. Company founder Ben Huh told the Syndey Morning Herald he has since received over 250 applications. Like the thought of a hungry cat watching me while I sleep, this terrifies me. Not only will Huh's new hire have to go through 7,000 captioned and 2,000 uncaptioned photos of felines each day, this person will be forced to check the grammar and spelling of that cruel and unusual punishment of the English language known as LOLspeak. No can has dignity!

You all love LolCats, right? The internet meme turned cultural phenomenon turned sure-to-be-best-selling book has warmed all of our hearts and lifted our spirits. Wouldn't it be great to work for them? With that in mind, did you apply for the I Can Has Cheezburger dream job?? They're hiring! The website's founder Ben Huh has received 250 applications since he posted the job opening on Monday, 243 of which are mine (sorry Nick!).