the lolruscape

A couple of weeks ago, I laughed my way through a slate.com slide show on the Internet phenomenon of the lolcats (“I can has cheezburger?”). My favorite variation is the lolrus and his search for his bucket. (ROTFL, in my opinion, but I showed it to an engineer who just stared blankly and couldn’t fathom what I found funny about it.)

Meanwhile, over on SavageMinds, another choice anthro blog, Strong posted the image from Arjun Appadurai’s website with the comment, “The brand evolves.” That got Rex thinking about what he calls “the importance of handwaviness” (mark my words, Rex has coined a neologism that will stick.) Let me quote from Rex’s definition of “handwaviness”:

a certain breathless quality of argumentation which relies on enthusiasm—rather than, say, evidence—to convince. I seem to remember this to be particularly the case for Appadurai, bits of whose essay might be paraphrased as saying: “gay filipinos are doing karaoke… to Elvis songs… ZOMG EVERYTHING IS FLOWING EVERYWHERE!” or “hey you know that fractal thing on NPR yesterday about how a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo and there’s a storm in Paris? GLOBALIZATION IS JUST LIKE THAT D00D!!”

Spurred on by his commentators, Rex followed up with his own theory macro:

And so I cannot resist. Lo, the Appadurolrus:

L.L. Wynn