Troy DeNuthe's World of Ice Cubes by Troy DeNuthe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Introduction

This review has been pieced together from notes written by my friend and sometime accomplice Clem de Menthe before he went into hiding with other members of Wikisucks in Icequador.

As far as I can tell, once he had written them down on a sheet of lined A4 paper, he chewed them, until they were a soggy mess.

He then turned them into ice cubes, using Troy DeNuthe’s special formula, where you half-fill an ice cube tray with water, freeze it, insert the foreign object (in this case, the soggy mass) and then pour more water on top, before freezing the full tray.

He then sent me a coded text revealing that he had hidden his review in his fridge.

I placed the ice cubes in a glass of rum and coke. I had to drink it really quickly, so that the ice didn’t melt too much and expose the paper pulp to the corrosive rum and coke mix.

Luckily, some of the ice did melt in my drink, so it didn’t take me long to locate the paper, spread it out on my workbench, separate the work using my clinical tweezers, recognise the pattern of his words, expose it to a lamp and dry Clem’s review.

I’m still not sure I got everything in the right order, but I think you’ll agree with me that his thoughts were worth preserving for posterity, if not necessarily in ice.


"Just the Tip of the Icecube" (by Clem de Menthe)

When I was reading Troy DeNuthe’s book, it suddenly dawned on me (the first of my Eureka moments) just how poor is our knowledge of ice cubes.

So I looked up the Wikipedia entry for “ice cube”.

Maybe I should have looked up the plural “ice cubes”, because the first page I got was the American rapper. (I just searched “ice cubes” now and it took me to the right “ice cube” entry straight away.)

This sort of thing has happened to me before, so I knew that if I wanted more, I had to click on the link for “ice cube (disambiguation)” (BTW, I’ve never seen or heard the word “disambiguation” used outside Wikipedia. Maybe I mix in the wrong circles?).

Another Eureka moment, for there waiting for me were three alternative meanings, one of which was “a chunk of frozen water in the shape of a cube”.

So I looked it up and guess what? There were less than 1,000 words on this topic.

Pathetic, isn’t it?

I mean, we expect Wiki to contain everything there is to know about everything, but if they can’t get “ice cubes” right, what does that say about the authority of the rest of Wikipedia?

What does this say about the very roots of epistemology in the twenty-first century?

So, Eureka moment three: just a few minutes spent in the clutches of "Troy DeNuthe's World of Ice Cubes" is enough to establish that Troy DeNuthe knows far more about ice cubes than the entire Wiki community, which I assume is the whole world (apart from Troy).

We cannot begin to tap the resource that is human knowledge, until we can extract from men and women like Troy DeNuthe the detailed knowledge of their individual areas of expertise.

Until we do this, all the Encyclopedias and Wikipedias strike me as a fraud on the masses. They’re a farce, a joke. A travesty of wisdom, a mockery of knowledge, a caricature of erudition.

This intellectual sloth cuts no ice with me.

Wikipedia is just scratching the surface, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. I want to know what’s beneath the surface. What are they hiding from us? Is this some epistemological conspiracy? Who’s behind it all? Is it the I.C.I.A?

Anyway, this is a quick snapshot of the world that Troy DeNuthe rides on into on his small but perfectly formed steed of a book, “Troy DeNuthe’s World of Ice Cubes”.

A thousand words on ice are not enough, they do not suffice for a man like Troy, someone whose greatest passion is to [ed: this part was a bit difficult to read, but I think he wrote “suck ice”].

Wiki might give us the berg, but Troy gives us the cube. The full cube. Indeed, but for some private suggestions I propose to draw to his attention, the whole kit and caboodle.

Forget about Wikileaks. This Wiki sucks, and Troy is just the man to achieve its true potential. A man of enormous [ed: perspacicity?], he is the Julian Iceage of the epistemological liberation movement.

His work does not purport to be exhaustive. It’s just a preliminary building block, an ice block that is content to form the base of an igloo, a shoulder upon which giants of ice can stand (to quote the English band, Oasice).

No doubt, there is more that Troy personally can impart in further volumes, and I propose to contact him with a modest proposal.

However, hopefully, in “The World of Ice Cubes”, he was just [ed: sorry, I think Clem did actually say “breaking the ice”].

Ladies and gentlemen, we cannot tolerate this epistemological conspiracy any longer.

We must entice Troy DeNuthe from his hiding place, encourage him to return to the source of this slow-moving glacier of insight, arm himself with an ice pick and deal a fatal blow to the head of the icebergoisie who sit by complacently while the rest of us endure injust-ice.

Ladies and gentlemen, we must escape the darkness of our cubicles and embrace the ice cubes of enlightenment.


"How to Improve Your Ice Sight Without Glasses: A Proposal" by Clem De Menthe

The following notes appear to be suggestions for a proposed collaboration between Clem and Troy on a second volume of “The World of Ice Cubes”:

Why ice cubes, not ice balls?

Why are they the size that they are? Not bigger? Not smaller?

Can you freeze hot water faster than cold water?

Who invented the ice cube tray?

What is the best size of ice cube tray?

What are the relative merits of imitation ice cubes?

I swallowed an ice cube, will I die?

Would an ice cube melt in enough time for me to be able to breathe?


"Haiku DeNuthe (Ice Cubey Dooby Do)" by Clem De Menthe

Troy, beat exemplar,
Zen master of frozen ice
And cubic beauty.


View all my reviews