Hi, Chuck.

Your article put in most of the expected stuff -- Mensans are just
folks, come from all walks of life, love beer and chocolate, and so on.

Looks like you heard only what they wanted you to hear; that's
understandable.

Hardly do for it to get around that one of the ways Mensans are "just
folks" is that some of them are actually rather dumb, don't always
act ethically, and have scandals they're trying very hard to hide.

It's an easy theory to test, if you'd care to contemplate a follow-up
story ...


Start by going to http://www.ag2003.com/raffle.php -- You might have to
be patient, as the page ineptly uses the full-sized photos as the
pseudo-thumbnails, and the page will take over two minutes to load at
28.8 dial-up speeds.

On that page you'll find gems like "until the AG begains" and
"tax-deductable" along with an uncapitalized kevlar.

(You can also find uncapitalized "caesar" and "danish" at
http://www.ag2003.com/meals.php.)

More? Try http://www.ag2003.com/tours.php where you'll find a reference
to "John Dillenger" and "Baby Face" Nelson rendered as "Babyface" (the
musician/producer?).

The Minnesota Mensan behind this is Jason Schmitz, who was originally
asked to develop some Annual Gathering pages for submission to the
Minnesota Mensa Webmaster. Instead, AG Chairman Judy Hogan had him
secretly develop the pages as this separate "ag2003.com" website.

Jason has been embarrassing Mensa since late last summer, when this
website made its debut featuring the word "museum" misspelled as
"musuem" three times on the same page.

Being an illiterate Mensan is one thing -- being too inept or arrogant
to even use a simple spell-checker is another.

Then you might consider the ag2003.com domain name itself. Why .com?
Mensa is an ORGanization, not a COMmercial entity.

As it happens, using ".org" for all things Mensan is in fact the
official policy of Mensa International. Proof: stop by
http://www.mensa.com/ and see for yourself.

And what is the Mensa-level thinking that picked "ag2003"? Nothing like
attracting lots of visitors that are interested in the state of
agriculture during this year. You'd think someone "smart" would have
checked out a few other similar names, like http://www.ag2000.com/, to
see if there might be some potential for unwanted confusion.
(www.ag2002.com was Airbus Online Magazine last year.)



There's some scandal brewing here -- there are at least four members of
the Minnesota Mensa Board of Directors that have ousting in their future
for allowing this sort of embarrassment to exist.

At the very least, you might get an interesting answer if you were to
ask Judy Hogan why Jason Schmitz is also being permitted to play
webmaster wannabe with the semiliterate http://www.mnmensa.org/ while
the authentic website is at, as you might expect,
http://www.minnesotamensa.org/. And Jason's AG material is where it
should be, at http://www.minnesotamensa.org/ag2003/ (cleaned up and
spell-checked).

Regards,

Al Heigl
Webmaster
--

Al Heigl
Mill City Records
P.O. Box 177
Northfield Minnesota 55057-0177
507-663-6090
(Professional Proofreading,
Web Site Work using FrontPage 2002)
http://www.millcityrecords.com/webwork/