New York Times parody site goes ‘cat’atonic

A bizarre Web site, NYtimes.cat, suddenly appeared on Thursday — aping the front page of the real New York Times site except for one thing: Every photo on the page was replaced with a cat video.

The site was listed as owned by Brian Abelson, a Brooklyn resident. When we reached out via e-mail, to ask what was up, the person responded with a nearly 300-word response that was anything but coherent. It began: “Knock over christmas tree fall over dead (not really but gets sypathy [sic] who’s the baby if it fits. i sits lounge in doorway but the dog smells bad.)”

“Yes, while he is clearly very clever, this is a clear violation of use of our intellectual property, and we’ve asked him to take the site down,” a Times spokesperson said.

At 4 pm Friday the mirroring of the NYTimes.com  was taken down replaced with  a cease and desist letter written by the Times General Counsel Kenneth Richieri.

At 5pm Friday traffic to NYTimes.cat was redirected to Buzzfeed.com a site that professes to be more than just cat videos, but maybe not.