P. Zinner,

It was a rainy day at the 2009 Audiophile Bake Sale in Corduroy, South Australia — a portentous day for cake, and for local history.

While the reception to flour confections in Corduroy has traditionally been positive, 2009 proved to be a difficult year, with inexplicable issues ruining the day for many involved. Tempered chocolate refused to snap. Sturdy cakes lost all structural integrity. The generator powering the appliances froze over multiple times, requiring constant maintenance with a hot towel and a chisel. And the frosting on the proverbial cake, or lack thereof, came when Mrs Ingram's popular ‘fungal frosting’ was confiscated by the local vice squad after they received a tip that the mushrooms used to make it had bruised blue during production.

In the midst of this well-aerated batter of uncertainty, there is one yolk of truth that can be relied upon: the winner of Cake of the Day. This honour belongs to P. Zinner, Podcaster in Chief of P. Zinner & Co. Podcasts. His victory over every other competitor at the 2009 Audiophile Bake Sale is, on balance, the least contentious part of a day rife with the inexplicable.

But this fact raises a more pertinent question: Who exactly is P. Zinner?

Well, to know P. Zinner, you must understand P. Zinner. And the first thing you need to understand about P. Zinner is that you don’t need to understand anything about P. Zinner.

Let me elaborate.

According to public records, P. Zinner was born somewhere in Eastern Europe in the 1940s. Except he was actually born somewhere in South America in the 1980s, which has been verified by three different South American government sources, two private detectives, and an act of fluke haruspicy committed on the cliffs of Dover during the Great Storm of 1987. [1]

Except P. Zinner couldn’t have been born in South America or Eastern Europe during any of those decades, because multiple irrefutable eyewitness accounts in Australia have pinpointed the very moment that an infant P. Zinner emerged from the Great Australian Bight. It is said that he crawled out of the sea, toddled straight into Ceduna, and had his birth certificate cited by a Justice of the Peace right before close of business on Friday December 31st, 1999.

While his origins are difficult to pinpoint, it can be authoritatively stated that P. Zinner is a lifelong learner and content producer. It began early [2] — across the many primary schools he may have attended, legends of a young P. Zinner abound, devouring all manner of extracurricular knowledge with the singular intention of sharing it with others.

More than a few of us have met an archetypal ‘P. Zinner’ on the playground: a child who has seen more books than sunlight, who shares more facts than pleasantries, and who will assuredly, post-adolescence, have a buttery smooth voice perfect for podcasting.

P. Zinner’s penchant for uplifting and disseminating knowledge survived his graduation from primary school. For years, every time the Uvirkelig Library in Forfalskning has weeded their collection, there have been locals who have misinterpreted the throwing away of these books as an act of intellectual and creative censorship. [3] In response to this, P. Zinner — in a fit of pique as regular as clockwork — will chain himself to the skip full of mouldering books outside the Uvirkelig Library and describe in magniloquent detail the contents of each and every discarded book. Can this be considered the first serialised podcast? The Guinness Book of Records doesn’t say that it isn’t. [4]

P. Zinner’s qualifications present another quandary. How did he complete his Master’s thesis on the history of podcasting before the undergraduate that was a prerequisite for it, and how was he qualified to teach the graduate certificate for this course before that? And how, as a student in this same course, did he not get the highest marks? Particularly given that in this topic he was also the lecturer, the topic coordinator, and author of the textbook it was based on?

Questions here inevitably turn to P. Zinner’s family. You can’t have this many P. Zinners at one time, let alone within one university, without considering the possibility of nepotism. [5] Thankfully the university Chancellor, who has respectfully requested that the university in question not be named in this article, successfully quashed these allegations by putting together a taskforce expressly for this purpose. [6]

If they aren’t beside him within the academy, where then can P. Zinner’s family be found? This has also remained a mystery. Of P. Zinner’s mother (whom he refers to as being ‘piscine in nature’), no public records exist; only a bundle of love letters between her and a man calling himself ‘Young Derleth’ that were unearthed in a time capsule in Boston in the late 1800s. P. Zinner’s father only appears in public record as the owner of a failed New England paint supply company called ‘Colour’. Colour went out of business in 1927 when a dangerous surplus of Actinic Sky led to several warehouse explosions because, as the headline of the September edition of the Quabbin Aërolite glibly put it, ‘Colour Out of Space’.

Any attempt to determine the genealogy of P. Zinner via blood test has also proven to be an exercise in esoterica. [7] P. Zinner’s blood — which successive tests have revealed to be everything from Actinic Sky, to Massachusetts seafoam, to a kind of blood that has ammonia in place of water — continues to keep its secrets. [8]

A lack of family, however, does not a lonely P. Zinner make. He has long been a deeply enfranchised hobbyist. P. Zinner has hot takes on everything you could name, from the correct gauge of tracks to use with model trains (18G labret), to the easiest bird for tweeters to spot during the golden hour (the Carolina Parakeet), to the best competitive deck to play in any given collectable card game meta (Miracle Rogue Dredge sideboarding Steel type for the mirror), to the best subgenre of music (a capella djent). He is, however, not a fan of film, and his history as a benevolent patron of the arts has thus far swerved away from video content. When asked for his opinion on this, P. Zinner explained his dislike of the medium: ‘If I want to see an image, I want to stare at it, to savour it. Why would I want this pristine view to be sullied by twenty-four successive iterations in the space of a second? It’s unconscionable!’ [9]

P. Zinner’s passion for the recondite has not kept him away from political issues. He has a storied history of voting left, and he is an evergreen supporter of women’s suffrage and cyborg equality, the latter of which P. Zinner has assured interviewers ‘is a real problem where I come from’. [10] Furthermore, while he may be the patent holder for the ‘leather-bound podcast’, P. Zinner is far from being a leather-bound man. In fact, on a personal level, P. Zinner doesn’t believe he ‘owns’ anything. While P. Zinner reluctantly accedes to the utilitarian stance on ownership (he does “own” a podcasting business after all, though he makes no claim of ownership over the intellectual property of his clients), his own personal views on ownership are paradoxically Hegelian. For Hegel, intellectual property is inextricably linked to an extension of personality, a position which P. Zinner believes in for everyone but himself. In a feat of uncharacteristic self-awareness, P. Zinner has asserted that he is without a stable persona, and thus has no personality to extend, via ownership or otherwise. [11] This stance is lent additional credence by the fact that the human eye is unable to hold P. Zinner in focus for longer than a minute. [12]

But how can this be? P. Zinner is adamant that he is real, but equally adamant that his persona is incalculable.

How can someone without a concrete identity or sense of self be the winner of Cake of the Day?

The reality is this. Yes, the 2009 Audiophile Bake Sale in Corduroy, South Australia was awash with bizarre occurrences. But the most bizarre occurrence of all is that P. Zinner’s signature Avocado Ganache Spelt Wedding Sponge did not win Cake of the Day, despite being a superior recipe on every conceivable metric. It didn’t even place, a state of affairs which P. Zinner describes as ‘especially egregious’. His appeals to the local constabulary have been dismissed on the grounds that they are ‘farcical’, and despite mailing a thick slice of Avocado Ganache Spelt Wedding Sponge to every attendee in the town of Corduroy, the decision has not been overturned. [13] P. Zinner, who ‘remains vexed’, finds it difficult to speak on the matter to this day. [14]

So what is the reality of the situation? All the P. Zinner facts presented in this article can’t all be true. Can they? If he didn’t actually win Cake of the Day, how can anything mean anything, to anyone?

Here’s what we know for sure.

Regardless of his age or origins, P. Zinner is Podcaster in Chief of P. Zinner Podcasts, and has a passion for Australian podcasting. As Podcaster in Chief, P. Zinner has entrusted Justin McArthur and Ciarán Moffatt with the day-to-day operations of the company, making good use of their combined industry experience and passion for the form. Justin and Ciarán have P. Zinner’s deepest confidence, and they can both confirm that P. Zinner ‘is very real’ and is in fact ‘an extant human man’. While he has no need to be seen or heard, P. Zinner is the heart and soul of this company, and under his peerless guidance, Justin and Ciarán will provide an exciting new platform for local Australian podcasts to flourish and grow.

At the end of the day, you don’t need to understand P. Zinner. You need never lay eyes upon him; it is enough to perceive him within yourself. All you need to know for sure is his name: P. Zinner, Podcaster in Chief, a purveyor of fine podcasts.

And winner of Cake of the Day.

Article originally published in the Pro Re Nata Zine, based on information obtained in an interview conducted by the Prez of the Nine Inch Nails fan club, in the town of Piner, NZ.