Ben Huh
Maybe he underpays his employees, and doesnt pay his content suppliers at all, but Ben Huh has built his ICanHasCheezburger.com into one of Seattles biggest tech success stories. His family of Web sites, most featuring user-generated pet photos and wacky, misspelled captions, reaps the kind of page views that the MSM can only imagine. (See also: FailBlog.org and GraphJam.com.) Lately hes also become a publisher of humor books, with the iconic LOL Cats again getting into more ungrammatical mischief. Tonight hell show and discuss images from I Has a Hotdog: What Your Dog Is Really Thinking (Grand Central, $12), which is sure to lead to calendars, greeting cards, T-shirts, and coffee mugs. It may not be enduring literature, but Oh hai and Do not want! have become part of the nations watercooler parlance. The power of such memes is to cut through our Internet info-clutter, the too-muchness of the Web, with one easy click to a smile (or frown, if ur [sic] a copyeditor). BRIAN MILLER
Fri., April 23, 7 p.m., 2010
