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Jones Soda is teaming with Icanhascheezburger.com to put LOLcats on bottle labels.

(Credit: Jones Soda/Icanhascheezburger.com)

I can has a break?

OK. I love Icanhascheezburger.com, and LOLcats in general, as much as the next guy. Truly. I have spent hours, in aggregate, laughing myself to tears on the site.

But when I ran across an item on the site on Tuesday morning announcing that it is teaming up with the trendy micro-soda company Jones Soda to run a contest to put LOLcats on root beer--and other flavor--bottle labels, I had to ask myself if someone was maybe huffing a little too much catnip.

LOLcats, of course, are the whimsical combinations of silly pidgin English phrases and funny pictures of cats or other animals. And Icanhascheezburger.com is the lion in the LOLcat kingdom. And I even think Jones soda can be pretty good.

The two outfits are teaming to find the highest vote-getting LOLcats in a special contest, the top five of which will adorn special bottles of the soda.

But I just don't quite see the connection between LOLcats and the soda buying community. It's not that I don't think that a lot of people who buy Jones soda also enjoy LOLcats. It's just that I'm not sure how well they translate onto a soda label. It would be one thing if the LOLcat choices were specifically about soda in some way, but because they're going to be the top-five vote-getting choices from Icanhascheezburger.com's contest, they will likely be about walruses without buckets, or tigers pretending to be monorails. There's just likely to be a disconnect.

On the other hand, maybe I'm overthinking this. I suppose it's possible that people will be walking down the aisle in their local supermarket, see the strange labels on the soda and laugh themselves into buying a few bottles.

And people do love custom labels, or magazine covers, things that bring a little social context to their everyday products. Just look at Reason magazine and the personalized satellite images of each subscriber's address that it put on the cover a few years ago.

This won't be quite so personalized, however. And that's probably good, since LOLcats definitely follow the 80/20 rule.

So will this sell more soda or raise the profile of LOLcats? I have no idea. I just wish instead of partnering with a soda company, Icanhascheezburger was teaming up with politicians to make campaign posters. Now that would be a mashup I'd like to see.

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