Update below! (Apr 11, 2007)

There is a website called mintred.be. Their logo looks like a giant pair of green testicles.

Their fruity pink font is not red, despite what they would have you believe. Perhaps pink is a shade of red. Perhaps pink is a sign of people with no taste. I believe it to be the latter.

Let us see who came first according to Mr. Who Is:

MintRed.com - Registered: June 11, 2001
mintred.be - Registered: November 14, 2003

The better site was clearly registered first.

Furthermore, their site is serious and uses words that I could not possibly understand such as "vernissages", which is followed by "etc.", making it plainly obvious that there are more things like that.

Absurd!

They can also assist you with public relations (PR), and fashion, lifestyle and magazines. They are Belgian. This is unfortunate because much earlier I made the following post: Belgium Rulez. (That posting was originally written to honor a pair of Belgian interns that worked with me at some point. I liked those guys, hence the honor). I now retract that statement and I rather put forth that these people at mintred.be have tarnished their entire country with their copy-cat antics.

And surely antics is all they do! For you see in their newsletters section that they have not made a newsletter since Februari 2005 (sic).

Their site was also designed by the reknowned "T-kila". My site was designed by me, and my name is far more rational, at "Scott".

Allow me to now present my version of what must have happened:

. . .

CAST OF CHARACTERS

BLOMFER MOMFER - CEO of mintred.be.

KLUUNER BUUNER - VP of mintred.be.

T-KILA - Web designer who fancies terrible designs.

SCOTT - Me.

ACT I

All dialog has been translated for your enjoyment.

BLOMFER: I think we need a website to promote our terrible ideas.

KLUUNER: Agreed, but it should be in English for some reason.

BLOMFER: Yes, because we want to cater to people in the States and Japan, but we are far too lazy to make a Japanese version.

KLUUNER: Also, I don't know any Japanese people.

BLOMFER: Then it will be difficult to get started doing business in Japan. Do you speak any Japanese?

KLUUNER: No.

BLOMFER: English it is, then! Let's call T-KILA!

KLUUNER: Is that some kind of bad French rap artist?

BLOMFER: No.

KLUUNER: Is he a hitman coming to kill us?

BLOMFER: No.

KLUUNER: Is it some kind of pesticide or other gardening product?

BLOMFER: No.

KLUUNER: Is it some sort of marketing thing that ruins tea such that you buy coffee instead?

BLOMFER: No.

ACT II

BLOMFER: Allow me to present T-KILA!

KLUUNER: Hello, I am KLUUNER BUUNER!

T-KILA: Yo, yo, yo! What is up in the hizzouse?

KLUUNER: (Aside to BLOMFER) If he is white and Belgian, why does he speak like a black American from the year 1998?

BLOMFER: (Aside to KLUUNER) I don't know, but he speaks English, so he can help us.

T-KILA: So what kind of shizzle can I compute for you mofos?

BLOMFER: Yes, well. We want a logo that reminds people that visit our site of testicles.

KLUUNER: Large testicles.

T-KILA: Yo, yo, yo, I can takes me some pics of some really round limes, fo' sho', like 'snizzap!' (T-KILA mimes taking a picture)

BLOMFER: Good. And what color would you use for our logo?

T-KILA: Pink, my nigga!

KLUUNER: Perfect.

BLOMFER: Yes, let us move ahead with the project. How much do you charge?

T-KILA: My services ain't cheap, ya hear. I gots too much shit on my proverbial plate to fuck around with you lazy ass bitches all day.

BLOMFER: I understand. How about 10,000 euros?

KLUUNER: Uhhh..

T-KILA: (Shits pants in joy) Shit yeah, negro, consider it done.

T-KILA and BLOMFER shake hands. KLUUNER is shocked by what just happened.

ACT III

T-KILA unveils the website to BLOMFER and KLUUNER.

T-KILA: Yo, yo, yo, this is the shit right here.

BLOMFER: It is indeed "the shit". My poor design sense means that I instantly fell in love with it.

KLUUNER: I thought that maybe we spent too many euros on this, but now I realize that T-KILA is, in fact, the "man".

T-KILA: Fo' shizzle, yo.

BLOMFER: Put this on the American-invented internet immediately. We can use the domain name "mintred.com" to make sure we get plenty of the American clients we want.

KLUUNER: I am afraid that the domain "mintred.com" is taken.

BLOMFER: By whom?

KLUUNER: By Scott Rosenberg, of course. Also, his website is excellent, and he makes T-KILA look foolish on it.

BLOMFER: Does he make us look foolish as well?

KLUUNER: Yes. Very foolish. He also does not understand how to construct fake Belgian names.

BLOMFER: That is a shame. Let us call him now.

BLOMFER calls SCOTT on speakerphone and connects.

SCOTT: Hello, you've reached America.

BLOMFER: Oh good, I would like to know if you could give your domain name to us?

KLUUNER: Yes, and please stop making us look foolish.

SCOTT: What? I can't understand you. What language are you speaking?

BLOMFER: (Aside to T-KILA) You speak to him, in English.

T-KILA: Yo, yo, yo, what up holmes?

SCOTT: What the fuck?

T-KILA: Yo, yo, yo, this is T-KILA the illa from manila, I'm gonna drive to the gas station and my car I will filla!

SCOTT: What the fuck? Seriously, is this Smath and Stacy?

T-KILA: Nahhh, foo'.

SCOTT: Jordan?

T-KILA: I ain't no Jordan, why you gotta play me like that, kid?

SCOTT: Oh kay. I'm going to hang up now, you fruity idiots.

SCOTT hangs up.

T-KILA: Sheeeeiiit.

BLOMFER: This is a shame. We will have to use the domain "mintred.be".

KLUUNER: Yes, and forever sit in the shadow of the awesome site, "MintRed.com".


Update, Apr 11, 2007

I wasn't content just to let that article sit around on the classy MintRed.com, going forever unnoticed by the offending party (mintred.be). So, as was my wont, I emailed them a link to this posting. I sent the below email to the address on their site, as well as to T-KILA.

From: Scorpion Mint Red
To: XXXXX@XXXXXXX.be (Main address on site)
Cc: XXXXXXXX@XXX.be (some DNS contact)
Cc: XXX@XXXX.be (T-Kila)

Subject: The real MintRed. Not you.

Dear you,

I know you are probably thinking, "what a fine website we have here at mintred.be"!

Perhaps you will be shocked, then, to read my version of how your website was created:

http://www.mintred.com/article/103/these_foul_theives/

You will now wonder why I waste so much time on things. Let me head you off at the pass:

I TYPE QUICKLY. So this did not take long.

With Love,

Scott

From this carefully crafted email, I assumed that I would receive either no response or a scathing criticism of my own site. Hopefully it would include a play about me in three acts. The truth, however, is far more surprising:

From: ninette (XXXXX@XXXXXXX.be) (Main address on site)
To: Scorpion Mint Red

Subject: Re: The real MintRed. Not you.


Hi Scott

Still wiping the tears from my eyes: you're pretty funny -and you're right too. Well, maybe not about the testicles -but they replaced the first MintRed design, a cute ice bear wearing a red coat that looked as if he was bleeding from a really large wound (created by my son, bless him- the bear, not the wound I hasten to add). So that bear had to go and as we didn't have money to pay somebody to make another design and limes are green... the pink isn't very red, admitted.

The reason we took MintRed as our name is simple (once you know it): mint after my favorite addiction, peppermints (altoids to be exact, not for sale in belgium by the way, I'm not so smart in choosing my addictions) and it also stands for cool. And red because of my haircolor- and it also stands for..erm...hot. Cool & Hot, Yin & Yang.. We thought it was very nifty indeed. And maybe it was at the time.

Your interpretation of what happened is pretty close to the truth too -apart from the yo-yoing T-Kila- he found out that there already was a mintred.com but as we had some Mintred business cards printed with the logo (yes, those green balls again), we figured .be would be just as good as .com, I mean, it's just a website. We got maybe 20 visitors a day. No big deal. And we certainly didn't want to steal your name (I made it all up myself, I swear). We didn't even like the PR work much -both my assistant and myself are free lance writers, but as that doesn't really pay the mortgage we figured that having businesses pay us to write up their products was just another (better paying) way of writing articles.

Well, it wasn't. It was boring. Stressful. And not that wellpaid either. So we slacked (as you can see from our last newsletter's date), moved back to writing and to setting up an aids awareness charity and that was that.

I remember sending an email to Mr T-Kila earlier this year asking him if it wasn' t time to remove the Mintred website but he advised us to keep it there 'just in case'. Of what, I don't know.

I DO know however that I pay him a nice yearly fee for the pleasure of just keeping the site there, gaining cyberdust- and the only pleasure I got from that site in the last 2 years was your email. Which was very pleasurable indeed, I must say. So thank you for that -and now the only thing left for me to do is convince Mr T-Kila to take our site down. Now.

Have a nice day and I hope you enjoyed Easter!
Best regards
"You"

Unbelievable! A person on the internet with the senses of humor!

And a victory for MintRed.com! For you see, she assures me that most of my assumptions in my original posting were correct, and also promises to take down the imposter MintRed! Success!

(Because she was so nice, and I am not actually such a jerk as I appear to be, I sent a nice email in return. I also reassured her that I'm not actually looking for her site to be taken down.

I still maintain my postition that the logo looks like testicles).