Free Republic

STUART, Fla. — Wildlife officials say two men putting up a fence in Martin County on Florida’s east coast fended off and killed a 30-pound bobcat with a hammer.

 LOL (also written lol or Lol) is a common element of Internet slang used, historically, on Usenet but now widespread to other forms of computer-mediated communication, and even spread to face-to-face communication. It is an abbreviation for "laughing out loud" or "laugh out loud". "LOL" is one of many initialisms for expressing bodily reactions, in particular laughter, as text, including initialisms such as "ROTFL" ("roll(ing) on the floor laughing"), a more emphatic expression of laughter, and "BWL" ("bursting with laughter"), above which there is "no greater compliment" according to Magid. (Other unrelated expansions include the less common "lots of luck"...

Droves of cats and kittens are swarming into animal shelters nationwide, and global warming is to blame, according to one pet adoption group. Several shelters operated by a national adoption organization called Pets Across America reported a 30 percent increase in intakes of cats and kittens from 2005 to 2006, and other shelters across the nation have reported similar spikes of stray, owned and feral cats. The cause of this feline flood is an extended cat breeding season thanks to the world’s warming temperatures, according to the group, which is one of the country’s oldest and largest animal welfare organizations....

It's no secret that cats are popular online. In fact, the fickle felines inspired a Web Search column (www.startribune.com/websearch/?p=112) that received a great reader response. Since then, though, an entire kitty subculture has emerged on the Web in the form of cat photos with funny sayings written on them.At first, they were called cat macros, but now go mostly by the name lolcats -- combining the Web abbreviation for "laugh out loud" (LOL) and "cats." The captions are written with poor English and bad grammar, as if the cat is commenting on the situation depicted in the photo, which sometimes...