New Brunswick — Mouths agape, New Brunswickers logged into their work computers Monday morning and immediately loaded their favourite satirical news website, The Manatee, only to be shocked and awed by its new, stunningly beautiful, yet familiar look and feel.
Boasting fresh new features such as the ability to view the latest and greatest hilarious comments from a tab in the front page, as well as customizable ad space for local New Brunswick businesses to promote their quality wares, The Manatee website promptly crashed NB government-mandated Internet Explorer 7 browsers by 8:42 a.m. by overloading their capacity.
“We’re extremely proud to reveal this labour of love to our province,” said Manatee co-founder Shauna Chase at a press conference at Read’s Newsstand in Fredericton.
“We hope that New Brunswickers find it even easier to laugh at their politicians and newsmakers, and that they find it in their hearts to disable any ad-blocking software for our site so that we might try to become profitable, while putting up with the occasional Google Ad about how to lose belly fat in 7 days.”
Co-founder Alex Vietinghoff added that they received a lot of support from one of their volunteer writers. “We couldn’t have switched to a self-hosted website without the help of Shawn Rouse. He walked us through the complicated tasks and did a lot of the work for switching to his self-hosted servers.”
Vietinghoff also promised to the assembled coffee fanatics that they would be seeing even more variety in their content from now on. “When we started this website, we had a dream of growing and growing until we could eventually cover the Maritimes. That’s still a while away. So for now, enjoy more frequent original video content from The Manatee, starting today.”
The co-founders expressed sincere thanks to all of their writers and fans who create humorous content and who share it with their friends. They urged their audience to keep their eyes open for any poor-looking New Brunswick arts graduates with a sarcastic twinkle in their eye, and to buy them a coffee.
Where is the stumble upon share button ? ;(
You warned me. But I was so floored I couldn’t get back into my chair at work for several minutes, and as for mouths agape, well let’s just say my $2.68 Starbucks (venti bold, no room) became lukewarm while I tried to regain control over my lower jaw. I’m reminded of Friedrich Nietzsche who wrote “For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.” (By the way – could you ask Google to target me with one of those ‘lose belly fat’ ads please?)
Nice new look & functionality, Maniteeans!