Japanese dog of 'Doge' meme fame dies
The Japanese dog whose photo inspired a generation of oddball online jokes and the US$23-billion Dogecoin cryptocurrency died on Friday, her owner said. "She quietly passed away as if asleep while I caressed her," Atsuko Sato wrote on her blog, thanking the fans of her shiba inu called Kabosu – the face of the "Doge" meme. "I think Kabo-chan was the happiest dog in the world. And I was the happiest owner," Sato wrote. As a rescue dog, Kabosu's real birthday was unknown but Sato estimated her age at 18, past the average lifespan for a shiba inu, with her birthday celebrated in November. In 2010, two years after adopting Kabosu from a puppy mill where she would otherwise have been put down, Sato took a picture of her pet crossing her paws on the sofa. She posted that image – with the fluffy shiba inu giving the camera a beguiling look – on her blog, from where it spread to online forum Reddit and became a meme that bounced from college bedrooms to office e-mail chains. The memes typically used goofy broken English to reveal the inner thoughts of Kabosu and other shiba inu "doge" – pronounced like pizza "dough" but with a "j" at the end. The picture also later became an NFT digital artwork that sold for US$4 million and inspired Dogecoin, which was started as a joke by two software engineers and is now the eighth-most valuable cryptocurrency with a market capitalisation of US$23 billion. (AFP)