Not a lot of people know this, but Mr. Mick, The Nation’s dearly departed office cat, invented lolcat—that curiously cute feline patois that became an Internet craze. This was way back, like when Steve Jobs was unemployed and before people annoyingly began to overuse the expression “meme.” But a meme it did become—and now even Paul Krugman is a fan.
But Mick never thought about making a buck from his invention, which some doofus hijacked and sold for $2 million. He mostly did it to torment the copy department, sometimes logging into K4 and rewriting whole columns in lolcat. That’s Mick: inventive, wily, cooly affectionate but only from a distance, sometimes cranky and most of all—a spectacularly bad capitalist. He was, in short, the quintessential Nation staffer.
Here’s our photo tribute to Mr. Mick, may he rest in peace.
A lovely eulogy to Mr. Mick by Nation copy editor Dave Baker is available here.
