Congratulations to Wymsey! Wymsey made it into the NY Times today, via a cooking article which I’ll publish in full here as it will one day become subscription content.
Wymsey is the wonderful absurdist creation of Charles Ivermee, and to find out more about why I’m posting this here, skip to below the article.
Take Egg Off Speed Dial
By PAUL ADAMS
Published: March 8, 2006FOLLOWING a detailed recipe forwarded to me by a friend, I waited until 7 p.m., when my free minutes begin. I stood an egg in an egg cup between two short stacks of books. With my new Treo 650 I called my old Samsung cellphone, answering it when it rang. I laid the two phones on the books so their antennas pointed at the egg. Supposedly, this would give me a cooked egg.
But after 90 minutes, with the Treo’s fresh battery running low, the egg was still cold. Maybe, I thought, this method uses some sort of telephonic radiation to coagulate protein without heat? I whacked it on the table and watched raw egg ooze out. I poached it later by conventional means.
The recipe I used had been making the rounds on the Internet for the last month. It originally appeared in 2000, in the Wymsey Chronicle: wymsey.co.uk/wymchron/cooking.htm.
The Chronicle, a single-handed creation of a 60-year-old English legal archivist named Charles Ivermee, documents life in the fictional village of Wymsey. The original egg-cooking article, a step-by-step how-to ostensibly written by one Suzzanna Decantworthy, appears in a droll weekend supplement that also features a woodland hunt for wild tofu. Stripped from its whimsical context, though, the recipe, just offbeat enough to be credible, has been widely forwarded by e-mail.
The caprice of the Web snapped up the article only recently, with mentions last month on slashdot.org, boingboing.net and other sites. “Last year the page could expect around 100 visits per week,” Mr. Ivermee said. In the week of Feb. 6, when the Slashdot community noticed the recipe and extensively debated its veracity, that number increased to about 132,000 would-be cooks.
Clearly, people are eager to have their technophobias confirmed, but a cellphone’s power output is half a watt at most, less than a thousandth of what a typical microwave oven emits.
But those of us who are inclined to cook without a stove are not without recourse. I have independently confirmed the deliciousness of eggs poached in a dishwasher, fried under a hot iron, shirred on a radiator and coddled in a drip coffee maker.
Back in the dinosaur days of the internet, 7 years ago, I came across the Parish Board of the Micro-state of Wymsey which had its own Chronicle. A humorous chronicle with a very silly absurd forum. I’ve no memory of how in the world I got there but it was by accident. The place was composed of characters and it’s not very well known that I’m a triplet, but I am, and I told the second of those third’s, Irene de Mandible about the forum and she leaped right in. And if you think I go about informing and directing Irene toward things in a regular way, no, I don’t, as she is an embarrassment. This was my first and only time, a leap which meant that Irene eventually became Wymsey’s ambassador to “the area from the Mexican border with the USA to Cape Horn in Chile and all off-earth territories.” Which was right up Irene’s alley, the off-earth territories part. She was only confused by the other parts.
The website in which, at the time, I was investing my energy was Bigsofa, a subdivision of which was The Urlybird Times. I had intended to periodically do real interviews with people and ended up only doing a few, and among them were two interviews touching upon Wymsey. The first was with expert, Irene de Mandible because she is after all one of my three/thirds and was thus easy.
URLYBIRD: What inspired your interest in Wymsey?
IRENE: Hmmm. I honestly don’t recollect. I’m not sure I was interested in Wymsey. It just happened to be there.
URLYBIRD: Many things just happen to be there.
IRENE: Yes, but not where my ancestor, Adam de Mandible, happened to be as well. I understood he might have come to America from Wymsey in the 17th century. Wymsey appeared to me to have its share of knowledgable historians, and as I was at that time researching my family history I thought I would post to the parish notice board and see if anyone knew anything.
URLYBIRD: This was in September of 1999.
IRENE: You HAVE done your research, haven’t you? At first the Wymsical-powers-that-be insisted Adam de Mandible had no association with Wymsey. They insisted so strongly, despite the fact there was no evidence Adam de Mandible didn’t have anything to do with Wymsey, that I began to wonder why this was, why they would be so adamant about it. I mean, they were so adamant. Then it was later discovered that my Mandible ancestors did, in fact, attain Wymsey during the time of William the Conqueror. A family of cartographers. John Applegate was ever so helpful. I’m forever in his debt for this bit of illuminating information on my ancestors. Well, not forever.
URLYBIRD: They attained Wymsey…
IRENE: Went to Wymsey. Reached Wymsey. Achieved Wymsey. Yes, they attained Wymsey. I meant what I said. I don’t know if they were charmed by Wymsey and decided to make it their home, or if there simply wasn’t anyone left to dispossess, but, however they might have come by Wymsey…
Somehow Irene managed to wind up that interview referencing Naom Chomsky.
Another interview was with Pookah, twin sister of “expert Irene de Mandible”, which means she is the third of the thirds after Irene was reported as missing after Urlybird’s interview with her (being a big time webmaster of Bigsofa I didn’t want to let on that I was related to these people I was interviewing, which would have destroyed my credibility as a web journalist, though I did manage to drum up several very real people to interview). And Jeff, Irene’s husband, was interviewed as well.
POOKAH: Irene and I, we’re not much alike. At least I don’t think we are. But we’ve always had this psychic bond. This metaphysical sympathy, a link connecting us.
JEFF: IF THEYRE NOT TRAINED WELL SHE HAS TO KEEP THE DOGS ON A CHAIN WHEN SHES PAINTING THEM SHES A GREAT CANINE PORTRAIT ARTIST ONE OF THE BEST THERE IS SHES TRIED PAINTING CANINE PORTRAITS USING PHOTOS BUT ITS NOT THE SAME I PAINT TOO SO I UNDERSTAND BUT MY SPECIALTY IS PAINTING GUITARS HAVE YOU EVER SEEN THE GIBSON #$% SERIES AQUA AUTOBODY PAINT #@$% WITH THE SUNBURST FINISH AND ALLIGATOR CRAWLING UP BESIDE THE BETTY PAGE TYPE BEACH BEAUTY SAYING WISH YOU WERE HERE HAVING A GREAT TIME I DID THAT THEY ARE NOW ALL SNAPPED UP ON THE JAPANESE COLLECTORS MARKET
NYTimes, Slashdot, Boingboing, etc! Talk about Wymsey suddenly getting its extended fifteen minutes!
But we, in the know, were there first, way back when, in 1999 and 2000. Never mind that Wymsonians occasionally intimated that I was stomping around where I’d no business being. That business about the sunstone or whatever it was.
But I loved Wymsey so damn much…well, Irene did, that she couldn’t help herself, once y’know I’d put her in contact with them.
I got up from the keypad to get H.o.p. something to eat and was thinking how I might write in a humorous way of Irene’s ultimate disappearance from the internet, considered what the story might be and how I might write of how Irene was “in love” with Wymsey and how she was lost, totally lost, when Charles Ivermee turned out to have a personal life and got hitched and how she hasn’t appeared once on the internet since then. And up leaps son H.o.p. and follows me and smiles at me and says, “I’m in love with you, mommy” not one second later. Which is the kind of thing an 8 year old will say to his mom, though he’s never used the words “in love” before. For which reason I asked him what he’d said and he repeated. We hadn’t spoken in fifteen minutes as I’d been writing and he was drawing and as soon as I stood and turned to the kitchen and thought the words “in love” blam up leaps H.o.p. from his seat and out of the blue announces, “I’m in love with you, mommy”. Which means wow what about love even humorous absurdist spin-story fabrications, that any thought of love enters the universal unconscious and blam up hops H.o.p. to announce, beaming, yes, the great highway upon which we communal travel does exist, or may simply mean yes that the way to a boy’s heart is through his stomach, considering I had walked into the kitchen.
Anyway, please, take some time from your day and read the latest in Wymsey droll at the Wymsey Chronicle and dip into the archives. You can’t imagine how pleased I am at the numbers of others who have been recently acquainted with the Wymsey wit, even though it slammed the servers in a harsh way.
And again congrats from me, Marty and H.o.p.
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