Purple Rain

By Joe Cramit

Hey, it wasn’t easy getting MinnToast up and going so fast. And after our blazing debut, it also wasn’t easy matching our own brilliance day after day. So…

We took a couple of weeks off to recharge our batteries and come up with a philosophy. Here it is: we’ll only toast when we have something to toast. In other words, unlike our competition, we won’t be using all those made up names of writers to well, make stuff up, just so we can have entries and drive scads of hits to satisfy our advertisers. (Both of our advertisers have told us they don’t care that much anyway, so what the hell.)

I mean, who believes those names anyway? Dug Grow? They ought to be able to come up with something better than that. How about Spade Plant? That at least has some pizazz.

And, again with the numbers. “On the contributions side, Minnesota is decidedly purple.” They have a header that says “Public Numbers” and they write about colors. A story about numbers might have been “On the contributions side, Minnesota is decidedly 6″.

First, the story begs the question of, if the contribution side is purple, what color is the non-contribution side? Or contribu-tails, if you prefer. Where’s the investigative journalism there?

And then there’s the “decidedly” part. All we can say about that is, if Minnesota were “decidedly” colorful (and that’s not to suggest that the North Shore isn’t lovely in September) wouldn’t it be some sort of bold color like “passionately scarlet” or “lovingly azure?”

Purple is such a wimpy color. It’s not even its own color. It’s halfway between red and blue. In other words it CAN’T decide what color it wants to be. And Prince probably has it trademarked anyway and I don’t think the state wants to get sideways with his lawyers, if you know what I mean.

So, like I said, we’re not going to toast if we don’t have something to say. But when we have to toast, we will, just to keep the record straight. If that means we have to come back from vacation early to point out the difference between colors and numbers, we’re willing to make that sacrifice for you, dear readers.

Buffett and some other guy came in for a couple beers and some table tennis. They left soon after liberal commentators began to ask stupid questions.

By Joe Cramit

Omaha—Nov. 14. Investor Warren Buffett walked into a bar today in South Omaha, raising the average net worth of the nine people in the bar to a startling $3.5 billion. When asked how they felt about being, on average, worth $3,499,999,995 more than they had been before Warren wandered in, reactions of the nine construction workers who had been enjoying an after-shift shot and a snit, were varied.

“Even though Warren is a man of the people,” said Don Leahy, jackhammer operator, “we still don’t agree with his liberal politics. I mean, for gosh sakes, he owns a big chunk of the Washington Post and Costco…and they’re not exactly bastions of Nebraska-like politics, although I really do like the great big jugs of pretzels you can get there.”

“We’ve still got him outnumbered when it comes to voting,” stop sign holder Bob Simkowski added, “unless of course he gives a big chunk of money to Move On or one of those other blue state K-9 organizations, or whatever you call them. Then all bets are off.”

Many pundits have been wondering how it is that populations which have such a high average net worth maintain loyalty to a political party that has distinguished itself by profligate spending which has put the country in debt for decades to come.

Leahy had an answer for that. “Hey, as a proportion of GDP, the national debt is smaller than the amount I owe on my Visa…and the interest rates aren’t as high. I call that responsible spending. And since Warren walked in here, I’ve already been offered a much higher credit limit.”

When asked for his explanation of why construction workers overwhelmingly vote Republican in the face of predominant liberal theory that they should be Democrats, Buffett said, “I just came in for a beer. I’m thinking of voting Republican myself in the future. You liberals are just so annoying.”

We don’t know if this person wants his name used, so we won’t. But we thought he had such a darn good idea we’re going to actually start an outdoors sports page.

Here’s the letter:

You need an outdoors section for reporting on events like the Minnesota hunting season. Here is a picture of a nice deer I shot. It was hiding in a barn. I will send you some sausage.

We’ve tracked down yet another reason why the Strib’s circulation is falling: their failure to have their circulation manager study Latin.

In a post over at our parody site, MinnRoast.com, or something like that, David Brauer reports that, “Cindy Doege, the Strib’s pleasant-to-talk-to executive circulation director, terms complaints about recent editorial changes “de minimus — not even measurable” as a reason people give when they drop the paper.”

It’s de minimis, not de minimus, which doesn’t even make sense in Latin, much less English. No wonder they can’t sell papers over there.

By Gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooool

Welcome to the MinnToast.com Sports section.

An array of journalists will be contributing stories to this section. The articles will automatically be posted here as they become available.

Maybe it’s because our array of journalists over here at MinnToast is quite small, or maybe it’s because our tribe of techies is even smaller, but we haven’t been able to figure out the automatic posting feature of our software. God knows there are lots of sports stories out there but we go to them and push every damn button we can find and not one of them seems to import the story automatically into MinnToast.

But, we’ll keep working on it until we get it right.

Until then, here are a couple of things we know about today’s sports.

David Beckham will be here today to kick a ball around the Metrodome. He’s English and has a hot wife, and so that’s good enough for us to toast, even though we couldn’t do so automatically.

Welcome to the MinnToast.com World/Nation section.

An array of journalists will be contributing stories to this section. The articles will automatically be posted here as they become available.

We’re very proud of our array of journalists here at MinnToast. In fact, we’re even prouder that the English language has chosen to award journalists with their own collective noun–an array of journalists has such a nice ring to it.

A pod of dolphins, a murder of crows, a pride of lions, an exaltation of larks, a bevy of quail, a skulk of foxes, an infestation of lice–we’re in good company.

We Have A Winner

By Gerund R. Anderson

Although some of you may be upset that we didn’t announce this contest publicly first, we have nevertheless declared a winner in the First Annual MinnToast.com Parts of Speech Contest.

One lucky professional journalist out there is going to receive a special certificate from us that he can proudly display in the office of his professional editor somewhere on the bookshelf next to his unopened copy of Elements of Style.

This certificate will read: This Award for Meritorious Use of the Gerund is presented to (name of the professional journalist) for daring to write three contiguous gerunds and then boldly following them up with two more to make a total of five in one sentence. To wit:

“For instance, Pawlenty initially made several statements on what he would do, including indicating being open to a special session, and looking at increasing the state’s gas tax for the first time in nearly 20 years.”

But since we feel guilty about having this contest without letting you in on it first, dear reader, we’re going to extend our largess to you as well.

The first of you who posts a comment on this toast with a link to the quoted story, will win the first ever printed MinnToast.com t-shirt, along with a certificate of authenticity. Be sure to include your t-shirt size and what you like on your toast.

By Copernicus Jones

Welcome to the MinnToast.com Health & Science section.

An array of journalists will be contributing stories to this section. The articles will automatically be posted here as they become available.

Of course we already dealt with science just a little bit here. Because numbers are sort of like science. At least when I took science, we had to know, for example, the number on the door of the classroom and stuff like that. But then, later on we started having to know numbers like Avogadro’s Number (which for some reason has something to do with moles) and Planck’s Constant, which has something to do with dead cats, for gosh sakes. We thought we were in physics and all of a sudden they were talking zoology.

We soon switched to journalism, where you don’t have to know anything except to write down just what people tell you.

Mark Gisleson over at Norwegianity says MinnToast is not funny.

So, we had two choices: we could either type S-L-O-W-E-R for Mark’s benefit or we could try to actually be funny. So Mark, here you are. Hope you like it.

Ole and Lena got married. On their honeymoon trip they were nearing Minneapolis when Ole put his hand on Lena’s knee. Giggling, Lena said, “Ole, you can go a little farther now if ya vant to”… so Ole drove to Duluth.

By Joe “The Pro” Cramit

MinnToast.com is just what you’ve been looking for in the news—carbohydrates for people who just don’t give a damn what their bodies look like as long as their brains are fed all sorts of stuff that’s good for you.

If this is your first visit to MinnToast, here are a few things you should know. Number One and Don’t You Ever Forget It: WE’RE PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS and the other guys, well they’re professional, too, but not as professional as we are because, doggone it, we’re doing this mostly as a labor of love and they’re doing it just because they’re getting paid to do it, which come to think of it, makes them professional and us plumbers who happen to own personal computers.

Actually some of us were professional journalists a while back, but were drummed out of the club when we started using too much Grecian Formula to put a little color back into the beards we’d grown out to make us look more thoughtful.

Anyway, every day at precisely 10:37 a.m. CST, (or CDT if it’s “that time of year” and we can figure out how to download the fix from Microsoft that will update our computers back to standard time,) we’ll post something you don’t already know. And believe me, it will be stuff worth knowing – stuff like the quadratic equation, how to say “Could I have two beers, please” in French, and how to spell “google.”

Stuff like “how to create RSS feeds that work” we’ll leave to you. Maybe one of you nice people who knows how to do that could email a solution to stuffit@minntoast.com and we’ll pass it on to the guy here who knows how to CTRL-ALT-DEL all at the same time. I’m sure he can get it on the site tout de suite, which is French for “pretty darn fast.” Bet you didn’t know that! See, we’re already telling you stuff.

All day long, starting at 6:27 a.m., if our alarm goes off as scheduled, we’ll also be posting bloggy stuff. But because we’re professional and you’re not, we’re going to call them “toasts.” They’ll look like blogs, and walk like blogs, and quack like blogs, but they won’t be blogs because blogs are for people like you and “toasts” are for people like us who are “original” and “reporters” and, did I mention, “professional.”

Just in case you didn’t know how the internet works, if you are at one of these pages with “toasts” or even “stories” (which are like “posts” but have been put through our editing process to remove all personality and replace it with pedantry) and you run across some words that have a line under them, those are what are known to us “professionals” as “words that have been underlined.” If you run your mouse over them and push that little button under your index finger, for some reason you be magically transported to some other page. Don’t ask us how that works, because we’re still working on that, but be assured that as soon as we find out, we’ll let you know.

Did I mention that we’ll also be printing a copy or two of MinnToast on paper? But, I warn you, when you run across “words that have been underlined” in the printed edition, pushing on them with your finger doesn’t take you to another page. We do have our tech guys working on that though, and as soon as they figure out just what the hell the problem is, we’ll correct it.

Don’t think we’re all serious all the time over here, though. We’re going to have some fun, too. Check back tomorrow for the knock-knock joke of the day, and also don’t forget to send us your entry in the MinnToast “Fill in the Poem” contest. Today’s first two lines are “Roses are Red, Violets are Blue.” You send your witty way to finish that off to couplets@minntoast.com and we’ll publish the winner’s name and entry on the site tomorrow.

If you like what you see on MinnToast.com, you can be a member of the team just by sending us some money. We have different levels of “Toasters,” of course. You can be a “Genuine Seville Orange Marmalade” member for a contribution of $247 dollars. A “Single Source Honey” membership can be had for $37.95. And, you can be a “Welch’s Grape Jelly in a Little Jar with a Picture of a Dinosaur on It” member for only $3.25 or what we pay our writers for a story, whichever is less.

There will undoubtedly be some glitches in this site, but if you find any, I wish you’d keep them to yourselves. If you really feel that you need to tell us what’s wrong though, we wish you would mail a letter to Webmaster, MinnToast.com, One MinnToast Tower, Minneapolis, MN 55401. We prefer that you type them in the same font as our logo.

With your help and support, and your willingness to keep in mind that we’re professional and you’re not, we’ll build the kind of web presence that we can be prouder of than you could ever be of your pathetic little blogs.

Thanks for reading MinnToast.