Ocelopotamus

What a thing to wake up to! Following hot on the heels of yesterday’s post on the subject of tea-upon-ice, Grendel has drawn my attention to the fact that some unknown reader of this weblog has now created a Wikipedia entry for tea-upon-ice.

I am gobsmacked, flabbergasted, tiggywinkled, prattpaddled, chunderflapped, pussintuttled, argybarged, and various other polysyllabic British conditions-of-astonishment in regard to this development.

It appears that the entry has already begun generating some controversy within the ivied walls of Wikipedia, and it may not be around much longer.

As Grendel wrote, in the comments to the previous post:

Indeed, there seems to be some objection already to its very existence and a discussion page has been created by Wikipedia. One wonders just how close the Wikipedia people are to the Lipton people, and how long this important wiki will survive.

Given that I have not been publicly credited for my invention prior to this, nor demanded such credit, it is not surprising that the information should meet with challenges from those not in the know.

Dark insinuations of the involvement of Big Tea notwithstanding, it’s true that new ideas always create controversy in their wake, and the battles over the credit for those ideas are rarely resolved fairly in the lifetimes of the people involved. For example, will Tesla ever be given credit in the public mind for his invention of such items as the radio, the parachute pant, and the lemon bar? One wonders!

Still, I hope that the brave soul who created the entry, whomever she may be, is not slapped around too harshly by Wikipedia’s meter maids and weed-gardeners and gnomes and fairies and whatever else they have working there. (Or placed in hot water by the private security forces of Lipton, Bigelow, et al.!) It was certainly a noble attempt to add to the store of human knowledge, however quixotic.

At any rate, expecting that the article will disappear from Wikipedia soon, I have saved some screenshots and PDFs of it so that the valuable information contained in it will not be lost to humanity. (And I encourage those of you who would like to help preserve this information to do likewise!)

And who knows? Perhaps in time, tea-upon-ice will have its own Foundation, and the article could be republished at something like Tea-Upon-Ice-a-Pedia.com!

In the meantime, as I just posted in response to Grendel’s comments:

This is truly a banner day in the history of tea-upon-ice and my mind is all a-whirl trying to comprehend the meaning of this event.

Thank you for drawing my attention to it. I must now draw the blinds, put on a Mama Cass record, and pause for reflection and perspective.

And of course, brew myself a cool, delicious glass of what those in the know call tea-upon-ice.