The Onion-esque spoof site The Watley Review ran a piece earlier this week, “Bloomsday Virus Inflicts James Joyce on Mobile Phone Users”. Literary fans had apparently concocted a virus to strike on June 16, 2004, the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday. Bloomsday comes from Joyce’s densely packed novel Ulysses when the protagonist Leopold Bloom travels across Dublin on June 16, 1904. The virus supposedly replaced the phone’s address book with the convoluted narrative, and then passed it on to other cell phones.

Anti-virus experts expect the worst:

Anti-virus experts are warning that this mobile phone virus is almost surely just the first of many, and that there exists a plethora of densely symbolic literature that could be inflicted on an unwary mobile phone-using public.

“James Joyce is just the first salvo,” warned [Francis] Harrod, [with the anti-virus software developer F-secure]. “Melville, Camus, Dostoevsky, Woolf… It’s only going to get uglier from here on out.”

So the spoof says.

Other spoof stories in this week’s edition of The Watley Review (whose tagline, by the way, is “Journalism, Shmournalism”) include “U.S. Deciding Whether To Use FedEx to Ship Hussein Back to Iraq” and “WB Launching Americanized Harry Potter Series In Fall 2004,” the latter of which included the line: “The series, provisionally entitled ‘HP,’ will be an Americanized adaptation of the original books, more in keeping with the typical teen dramas which are the trademark of the WB.”

But amazingly, a number of blogs ran portions of the article as if it were true, begging the question of whether they were playing along with joke or thought it was real. It appears the story ran on MetaFilter without any disclaimer, though the comments section quickly pointed out the prank. A few sites ran the piece seemingly taking it seriously, including KoBot! and Eyebeam’s reBlog.

Apparently there are viruses that target cell phones, though I don’t think we need to worry about literature-inspired virsuses.