So, the other day BoingBoing featured a link to a seemingly harmless blog called rolcats.com. The site's author purports to be offering translations of images he takes from a Russian lolcat site called kotomatrix.ru. The twist is that they're not real translations at all, but an excuse to make Cold War jokes about Marxism and the KGB. BoingBoing seemed to get that it's a hoax, but in the past few days we've received queries about the site's authenticity from friends who aren't stupid. So let's put an end to the madness! After the jump, a real Russian lolcat caption for the photo seen above.

OK, we hope you're ready for this: “I always sleep with my masters in their bed: my left side faces the mistress, my right — the master. But last night while dreaming, I accidentally flipped over, and as a result, neither of them could recognize me, so they threw me out of the house.” Obviously, the photo seen here is a clean copy. With that text on it, you could barely see the cat. Welcome to the kotomatrix.

For all intents and purposes, American lolcat captions have one defining feature: lolspeak, that absurd combination of IM-chat shorthand and broken grammar. This constraint is conspicuously absent in the kotomatrix, where all cats speak perfect Russian, often in verse. But as befits a people famous for their genre-bending literature, this is only the first lolcat convention to bite the dust.

The snappy punchline is nixed in favor of long, meandering sentences. Cats philosophize: “How is it that fish are not salty if they swim in a salty sea?” a tabby on a beach muses, adding, “And why doesn’t this same principle operate in a domestic setting?” Others speculate about their past lives. Some don’t talk at all, as the caption takes on the more traditional role of omniscient narrator. In such cases, writers will assign the cats first names: “Murka got married, just the way people do. Only afterwards will Barsik learn of the children.”

More often than not, the photo is merely a jumping-off point, a clue to a larger narrative that the writer must then piece together: Well, let’s see… It’s a half-black, half-orange cat, sitting outdoors. What kind of amusing scrape could I concoct to have him end up there?

In a link below every image, the site dares you to enter the fray: “Can you do better? Make your own caption for the same photo!” But how do you define “better” in the kotomatrix, where “funny” doesn’t appear to be in vogue? Tinkering with the rhyme scheme, perhaps? Without the zaniness of lolspeak to anchor it, submissions can veer dangerously close to “Hang in there” poster territory.

Russians do in fact have their own variation on lolspeak. It’s inspired not by housecats but by a single macro: a cartoon of a warm-hearted bear who happens upon two people having sex in the forest. OK, it’s complicated. Fortunately, Michael Idov explored the subject extensively in our first issue.

In summation, don't believe the hype. The author of those fake translations on rolcats.com can't even begin to imagine how zen things are in the mirror world of the kotomatrix. And frankly, we wish he'd stop peddling his second-rate Yakov Smirnoff act. The fact that the jokes suck doesn’t offend us so much as the author’s tacit implication that another language is gibberish just because he can’t read it.