Winston is my hero

When I am feeling down, or lonely, or just bleugh, I turn to Winston.

Yes, dear readers, one of the most reliable sources of pleasure in my life is a fuggly New York apartment cat who sneezes, eats like a pig and gets dressed up in funny outfits. I dare you to look at Winston dressed up as ET for Halloween and not fall instantly and irrevocably in love.

Here’s Winston dressed as Santa, eating like a pig, hissing at a dog and sneezing while wearing a wig. If that doesn’t satisfy your desire for all things Winston, you can watch him getting a bath, being slipped into a pair of pantyhose for his 2007 Halloween costume (as a sandworm) and being shaved.

And if that still isn’t enough, check out the video of Winston and the scratching post, complete with disco track and Viagra ad in the background (seek medical help if you have an erection lasting longer than four hours).

It’s all strangely compelling. The cat is ugly, but in an adorable way, and because he is so compliant – in a way that most cats never are, as the scars born by their owners attest – the videos of him have an almost surreal quality. I find him utterly fascinating, though this might be due in part to the fact that I have not seen my own cute fluffy cat in six months and am craving feline company.

I am not alone, though: other people love Winston too. He has a substantial following on his owner’s blog and Cute Overload as well as YouTube; the videos of him hissing and eating blueberries have over 100,000 and 104,000 views respectively. A little girl wrote a storybook featuring him. Read the comments people leave to get an inkling of how much casual viewers love a cat that they have never met.

What makes Winston even more lovable is that despite being a purebred Exotic (a short- haired Persian) he was a rescue cat. Clearly the universe intended him to end up with an owner who possesses a video camera, a blog and a YouTube account.

Winston is an instant antidepressant, which is why he and other cute, fuzzy stars of the virtual world have become so popular. Cute is a growing category online, driven in part by women seeking respite from the grim reality of corporate America, according to this article in the New York Times.

Allied to the growth of cute is the lolcats phenomenon. Jay Dixit in Salon suggests that lolcats have such tremendous appeal because they are both funny and sad at the same time. Bob Mankoff, cartoon editor of the New York, argues that lolcats are not about animals at all, but humans: “The animals aren’t animals at all, they’re stand-ins. They’re hybrids we use as devices to talk about the feelings we can’t name in other ways.”

Mankoff goes on to point out that people are interested in lolcats rather than lolrats because cats have expressive faces. But I think he misses what makes lolcats funny. There are loldogs sites too, but they are never as popular, or as funny, as their feline equivalents. The New York Times once suggested that this was because dogs are public and visible, while cats are private, usually house-bound. But there’s a sense that cats are concerned about the preservation of their own dignity in a way that dogs are not, which makes the mis-spelled headings and garbled grammar of lolspeak somehow funnier.

Icanhascheezburger, the big daddy of lolcat sites, has reported a substantial increase in web traffic. Though revenue from ad sales seems to be tailing off, the investors who bought this blog for $2 million back in September 2007 must be congratulating themselves for their ability to spot a goldmine. It has been reported that Icanhascheezburger will boast a billion page views this year – not bad for a site started by a single photograph of a cuddly British Blue cat posted by a pair of Hawaiian students.

The world is a grim and daunting place right now. The election victory of Barack Obama aside, we can expect many more months, perhaps years, of gloomy headlines. We’ve still got climate change, the global economic crisis, recession and war to contend with. For some of us, it is the ceiling cats and the basement cats, the dramatic chipmunks (actually a prairie dog) and dramatic lemurs and yes, the Winstons of this world that will keep some of us sane.

There’s no guarantee that the meek will inherit the earth. But the ironic and the cute might just stand a chance.