Anyway, that’s the claim of Franken spokesperson Jess McIntosh, who first told the Minnesota Independent that our query about Franken’s alleged IOOF membership would have to take a back seat to more pressing matters like national health care reform.

But when we told her about Walter Mondale’s frustration with Wiki-vandals who alleged the former Vice President kept roosters and sang opera, McIntosh promised to get back to us with an answer.

“That’s a no on IOOF,” came the message from McIntosh a couple hours later. “Sorry to disappoint.”

But our disappointment that Franken was not in fact a member of a 19th-century fraternal organization with a funny name was nothing compared to a let-down that happened last week.

A West Coast reader and former Minnesotan tipped off MnIndy that he’d received word from a friend at the Minnesota State Fair that the seed-art version of President Obama’s birth certificate was — as is so often claimed about the actual document — missing.

When State Fair authorities checked on the matter for MnIndy and found nothing untoward at the Crop Art exhibit, no blank spot where the birth certificate facsimile-in-seeds had been … now that was disappointing.

“I won’t take responsibility … Somebody told me about Wikipedia, where people can put in whatever they want into, in my name. I tried to correct some of it … somebody decided I had a pet rooster, somebody else said I was an international opera talent, but I decided not to go into it, and you know what … this is bull.”

Mondale’s Wikipedia entry has apparently since been scrubbed of any poultry or operatic claims.

The interview — which focuses on Mondale’s views as an elder statesman and his new role as honorary Norwegian consul-general in Minneapolis — appears in the latest issue of Nordic Reach but took place on  June 4, the day after Barack Obama announced he’d clinched the Democratic nomination for president at the Xcel Center in St. Paul. That was the same day on which Mondale switched his own endorsement from Sen. Hillary Clinton to Obama — although on MySpace, the interviewer informs Mondale, Obama was already one of his top friends.