New levels of absurdity on the internet

Ok, by a show of hands how many of you have pets?

If you just physically raised your hand you may be type of person I'm about to make fun of, so keep reading at your own discretion. Now before we get started I should point out that I have owned pets; a dog, a couple of cats, a bird, a bunch of fish and a rabbit that I barely remember (and yes, his name was thumper). So I do love pets and was always saddened whenever one of them died. Particularly when I saw my dog get hit on the road, and when I removed the cats corpses from the road. Ah the happy childhood memories.

Anyway, on to the topic at hand. Now how many of you have heard of Friendster or MySpace or some other meaningless on-line community web page?

Yeah, you probably all have, they are popular. Actually they are more like popularity contests that are being won by fat middle-age guys posing as teenage nymphos, but I digress.

How many of you have heard of Dogster? Catster? Come on, someone must know about Petster?

That's right folks, there are websites dedicated to letting you present your pet to the world. You can post photos, share stories and even let your pet have a diary! Now ok, that's not so bad. Sure I kind of want to make fun of those people but hey, they care for their pets so that's all good. I mean these animals are probably living the high life so I'm sure they don't complain...well maybe about the stupid clothes they are made to wear. But some people take it to some pretty far out extremes, do we really need to know the daily routine of your cat? And should it really be written to us in a first-person narrative form? And why on earth are you having your cat get married? (Scroll down past the pictures to read the story, and yes, it's in the first person.) And don't get me started on the people who call themselves mommy and daddy in reference to their pets. How about this, if you insist on referring to yourself as your dogs mommy don't get offended if I call you a bitch.

What shocked me the most about the whole site though were the pages dedicated to dead pets! Admittedly some were set up for pets that had died recently, but do you really need to make a page for the dog your mother owned that you never saw? And should your pet die I would think it would suffice to say succinctly that they passed away. Maybe it's just me but I don't think writing another first-person narrative about their crossing the rainbow bridge (yeah, I had no clue what that was either) is a very healthy way to deal with the loss of a loved pet. In fact it's kind of creepy.

So yes, loving your pet is good, creating a quasi fictitious reality based around your pet, yet experienced almost entirely by you however is bordering on insanity in my mind. And yet there are almost 200,000 dogs on dogster.com, go figure. Though that also puts to rest the idea of the crazy cat people, there are less than 80,000 cats on there.

On second thought cat people are still a bit crazy.