Recently a reader sent me a copy of a letter that he had sent to his car insurance company in New Jersey.  We’ve all seen the Geico gecko commercials, and the average person might think that Geico is some cheapo company, but actually, it’s been around since 1936 and it’s a very solid company.  Your solid as a rock insurance carrier might have you believe that Geico is a “fly by night” company — and while there certainly are “fly by night” companies — Geico is not one of them.  Sometimes you hear the names of iconic insurance companies and assume that they are great companies — wrong.  Here is a letter from a reader — use your own judgement.

Dear Plymouth Rock:

You may have noticed that I recently switched to another insurance carrier — why did I do this?  My intention is not to insult your company, but rather, it’s more of a primer about how you should treat your customers.  Primarily, over the 13 years I was a client — first you were Prudential (my piece of the rock) but then I suddenly found myself insured by  High Point.  Isn’t that a state park in New Jersey?  Then, a few years later my new policy said I was insured by  Plymouth Rock.  Who the heck is that?   What happened to Prudential?

I often asked your reps why I was paying so much more than my friends and acquaintances.  I had a flawless driving record whereas many of my friends had tickets and wrecks. For several years I had a car that was paid in full and I dropped collision and other side-dishes, but still I was paying more than friends who had fancy new cars with FULL coverage.  I asked a hundred times, “Why?” 

The reps were always polite but they never really answered the question.  I was twice told that I was free to shop around for a better deal, and finally, after a lot of high-paying years, I did.

I’m glad I did because now, with the same exact coverage, I am paying LESS than half of what I was paying Plymouth Rock aka High Point aka Prudential. 

The thing that pushed me over the edge was a call I made to Plymouth Rock not too long ago — another call where I asked about my high rates and cheaper rates I was quoted by other companies. The answer I got from a very pleasant rep was disturbing.  It was suggested that other companies were “fly by night.” — One rep said, “What if you get in an accident and spend months in the hospital and were paralyzed, or what if you were to run over a kid on a bicycle?”  

That was very unpleasant to hear, and that silly remark notwithstanding, if you’re going to call another company “fly by night” how do you explain that while I was with you, I never really knew who my insurance company really was?  Like I said, one year it was Prudential and then a few years later it was High Point and then more recently it was Plymouth Rock.  I never received any information or notification of these changes. 

The company I switched to has had the same name for over 75 years.  So, aside from the extreme savings for the same coverage, I simply did not like the way my business was simply “taken” — I figured that I was overcharged by about $15,000 since 1999.   Sincerely **** ********.

TheDamienZone wonders if this company will respond.   Please note that not everyone is happy with Geico, but I am not happy with my local wine shop, so it’s all relative.  Not everyone saves money by switchin to Geico, but this guy did, and he did a great job of telling his story.

If a rep from Plymouth Rock wants to know who sent me this, I have their permission to tell you.

WRITER’S NOTE:  THE ESSAY PICTURED ON THE RIGHT IS MY FEEBLE ATTEMPT AT MOCKING THE ACTUAL LETTER WRITTEN BY THE “BRAVE GAY BOY” WHO DOESN’T REALLY EXIST!  IT’S HOW I IMAGINE THE ESSAY SHOULD LOOK.

[Damien LeGallienne]

Just when I was finally content with the knowledge that nothing could ever be as grotesquely maudlin as the white trash CB Radio trucker Christmas song about the “Poor Little Crippled Boy,”  god went and struck me down by bringing along something a whole lot worse.  Now I have to start all over again.

I humbly submit for your approval, my take on the latest Facebook “share” sensation — the totally fake story about the poor little –  but not crippled –  gay boy who wrote into a poor little mentally crippled blogger.  The sappiness is outweighed only by the fakeness.  ENJOY! 

Yes, now the gay folks —  people who are usually pretty smart about being scammed on Facebook —  have fallen victim to the latest hoax — and it was brought down upon them by their own kind.  Yes, other gays, or, in this case, a blogging “daddy” who pretends to care oh-so-much about gay kids. (sigh)

It’s an amateurishly maudlin story (is there any other kind) about a mother who contacts one of those oh-so-caring simpletons after she stumbles upon an essay where her 15-year-old son comes out as gay after getting an assignment from his evil Christian teacher:

Don’t get nervous, folks.  It’s all fake — totally.  You will eventually see it on your Facebook page because we all have a few morons on our Facebook pages — people who like to “share” thoughtful and insightful….and FAKE stories.

This FAKE blog that some of your dumber gays and a few dysfunctional mothers who shop for craft supplies at “Michael’s”  are spreading around Facebook, was written not to help gay kids or to bring hope to young people who grapple with issues about a budding sexual identity crisis.  God no!  Do not fool yourself into believing that for one second.  No! No! No!  It was written simply to blast Christians and to manipulate the social consciousness of the average person who is dumb enough to believe it’s a true story.

Are there gay kids who are sad because they are stuck in a Christian Fundamentalist school?  Of course there are, but the story used to get that message across is fake.

There are gay kids stuck in Yeshivas and Mosques and Amish country too, but you will not read about that.  Why bother to lend a hand to those kids when you can — Bash the Christians — it gets attention; mostly from other former Christians and the new Nazi atheist misfits who think atheism is a religion.

The only thing these people hate more than themselves is truth — but the self-loathing is a huge issue too.  We can’t ignore that.  One should have some degree of compassion for these idiots.  After all, we are civilized beings.

The blogger, who I will not name because he’s a dick-weed of the highest order, forgot to write the story about the gay school kid in Iran who got his head chopped off in the street because he wrote a love letter to another boy.  Nah –who cares about that atrocity?  It’s so much easier to mock the Christians and get stupid people to pass along the link on their Facebook page.  After a milion cretins share the emotional moment, and you make money off your fuktard blog, the damage is done.  Don’t you just love the Bossa Nova, Dolores?

Anyway, kindly note that I am not directing you to the blogger because he is a complete jerk-off who needs a good what ‘fer.

I imagine that you’ll find him all by yourself, and then some of you will write me nice comments while others will say things like, “Are you off your meds?”  or “You’re pathetic!” or “Do you write this from your mom’s basement?”  — the usual stuff.  If you’re gonna hate on me, BE ORIGINAL GODAMMIT!!!

And you know what really ticks me off?  This blogger is the kind of guy who could, in all probability,  cause a gay teen to kill himself.  Yes! You think I’m crazy, but yes!

Some gay kid might read that fake story and say to himself, “Gee, my mother doesn’t care as much about me as that lady who wrote into the blog about the other gay Christian kid.”  Then a few hours later the police are dragging the river under the Hooterville Bridge and people sob, “Why?  Why?”

Of course, the blogger did not think about this when he invented the story or perhaps passed along the invented story. He only wanted to be viral on Facebook — and that’s all that matters.  This kind of shit sooooooooo infuriates me.

Let me tell you people something.  You might find my blog and read this,  and then perhaps you’ll read through other articles in my blog and come away with the notion that I am some kind of idiot — I can accept that.  I often TRY to be an idiot so as to expose idiots  – not always, but often.

I am, however, a very professional writer for two major publications and I pretty much put absolutely no effort into writing this shit other than to research the basics I feel in my keenly perceptive gut, and I quickly write down the truth.

I work on this without an editor between real assignments, and I will probably write this entire piece in about 5 minutes ( it took me nearly 7 because I had to calm down).

The point about being a good writer, a really good one like me, is that you can easily spot when other writers are simply competent or ordinary.  In this case it was obvious.  The writer who pulled this stunt (playing both the part of the mother and the gay teen) can write well enough for a local Community Newsletter, but he has no imagination.  He’s a hack who can only write in one voice — he’s Salieri — I am Mozart for chrissakes.

I can easily hear the same “voice” in both the mother’s plaintiff email and the son’s woeful essay.  In other words, as a writer, I am able to detect that both pieces of shit were written by the same piece of shit — catch on?

We writers have what we call a “voice.”  Good ones — like me of course – know how to change that voice.  Sure, anyone can switch over to making spelling errors and grammatical mistakes so as to sound like a kid or a different person, but the VOICE is still there.  I am so good at changing my voice that I often have to convince editors in my real job that the stuff I submit is genuine.

The blogger I am talking about — the one with the sad, fake, gay teenager — does not have this ability.  He simply knows how to put a story together.  It’s like learning how to load the dishwasher — anybody with arms or hooks can do it.

The hand-wringing mother in this tale is a windbag – notwithstanding the fact that she is an imaginary character —  because she not only went through her kid’s paperwork, she told the whole world, or the 50 people who read that blog, that she was shocked when she read her son’s essay where he talks about his gayness (yawn).

Here’s the thing, it’s a sappy sentimental letter sent to, or totally invented by, a blogger who posts stupid inspirational crap…even if it’s fake.  He doesn’t care — he needs the traffic — who cares if the whole frigging story is a lie?

The picture of the kid  is outrageously fake — I won’t even put up the picture — it is so fake that I pray the perky kid who posed for the picture was well paid because, believe me, it’s not a picture of the kid who wrote the essay about being gay.  As a matter of fact, no kid wrote the essay.  Again, the entire thing — the mother who wrote the story about the essay and the essay itself — was written by the same person.  Both letters have the same voice.  The whole things is poorly done because it’s all done so perfectly….or what an ordinary writer would consider to be perfect.

I am going to do one of these fake, maudlin, pitiful stories one day to prove how anyone can fake a story or a letter — I mean, I do it every day but I do it to be funny and I often get a riotous laugh out of it.

Let me give you an example of why some writers are good and some writers are bad and some writers are just average.

I often quote ”experts” on my blog — people who don’t even exist — and still they get emails from TV morning shows and radio shows asking them to appear as guests.  You might suggest that I am no better than the blogger who did this — WRONG!   I do it it to be obviously stupid.  I do not do it to manipulate and lie.  The TV shows and radio producers who call upon my “experts”  should be fired for being so stupid as to believe my experts.

So, think about it.  If I can get mainstream press about something as crazy as Snooki working for the CIA, how easy would it be for someone to post some sappy and sentimental story about a poor, poor, gay kid who was forced out of the closet by a mean Christian teacher?  Are you following me?

These crazy, Facebook sharers and those who enable them and encourage them are dangerous people because they are creating a race of internet morons who will believe anything.

Flora Vawn Butlers, 88, was nearly butchered to death last night in Cherry Hill, New Jersey (USA) by  her best friend Velma Cruthers 82, when Cruthers noticed that a few of Flora’s Mega Millions lottery tickets had some numbers that matched the numbers on her tickets.  She was so enraged that she picked up a meat cleaver and started hacking away at her friend until Flora’s sceams alerted a neighbor who burst into the home and restrained the attacker.

“She stole my numbers ,” screamed Velma Cruthers as she was hauled away – strapped to a gurney and put in an ambulance.

“They were my numbers!  She knew I always played number 46  and 27 in my Mega Millions.  She should die.  I hope I killed her.”

Luckily Flora Vawn-Butlers survived the attack but doctors expect she will have to have weeks of rehabilitation.  Several tendons in her neck were damaged by the attack and a few pieces of veal that were on the cleaver may have caused an infection when they entered deep into the muscle.

“Deep slicing wounds inflicted by an instrument where there is already animal meat, significantly raise the chance that she (Vawn-Butlers) will develop mad cow disease, but at this stage of her life it doesn’t really make a whole lot of difference,” said Dr. Murray Holiday who was the attending physician where the butchered lottery player was treated and eventually admitted.

This is not the only incident where a Mega Millions frenzy about numbers caused injury.

In Union City, New Jersey, a Weehawken man was shot and killed  in a lottery store when the man behind him heard him rattle off a few numbers that may or may not have matched a few of his.

According to eyewitnesses,  62-year-old Hector Klinemin-Velez shoved 89-year-old Carlos Vermerrez away from the counter and said, “Those are my numbers.  I always play 11 and 22.”

Witnesses then said that the old man replied meekly, “I play my late wife’s birthday 11th month 1922.”

Further reports say that this plea for lottery pity only served to further anger Klinemen-Velez and he took out his 357 Magnum and pumped 6 rounds into the old man’s head killing him instantly.

According to police, one woman screamed, “He just shot him with a 357 and he shot him 6 times!”   As Vermerrez lay dead on the floor in a huge puddle of blood in front of the befuddled Hindu man at the lottery terminal, the store was overrun with people who started playing the numbers 3-5-7 or 35- 7 or 3- 57 and then the number 6 as their jackpot number.   When the ambulance came it was too late for Vermerrez but frenzied lottery players ran to the curb to write down the ambulance number and license plate.

“I know that a man died,” said Doris Marcanttoti of Union City who is a devout lottery play and Catholic, “but if any of these numbers come out and I come outta this with 500 million, I am going to pay off that guy’s bail and help him with a lawyer.  You just don’t go around playing other people’s numbers.  I don’t give a shit if it was his dead wife’s birthday or not.  If I had a gun and he played my grandkid’s birthdays I would have shot the old son of a bitch too.”

According to psychiatrist, Dr. Dean Traherne, “The thought of $500 million is too much to handle for some people.  They actually think they own certain numbers and they will do anything to protect their property.  In this case one old lady ended up with hatchet slices and veal in her neck, and another old man died just because he wanted to win a few bucks.”

A spokesman for LPA “Lottery Players Advocacy” said that they “expect several more deaths and injuries before tonight’s drawing.  If there is no winner tonight and the drawing goes on into next week, there could be thousands killed.”

The Damien Zone agrees that money cannot buy you happiness, but in this case it can buy you death.  If, however, you play by the rules and etiquette, and don’t steal numbers from your friends, you might get out of this lottery drawing alive.

He went nuts on a Jet Blue flight and had to be restrained by passengers.  He ranted and raved about terrorists and the plane being “taken down.”  The plane he was supposed to be piloting had to make an emergency landing in Amarillo, Texas.  The co-pilot had to lock himout of the cockpit because he had a meltdown….but did he really?   Did the Jet Blue pilot who lit up the news yesterday really have a meltdown or is he just another in a long line of alien implanted people who’s chips are malfunctioning?

“It was rather confusing when a news reporter slipped up and said that the pilot was in a Texas hosiptal and under the care of the FBI.” said worlf famous physician and UFO expert, Dead Traherne MD.

“Who the hell has a meltdown and is put in the hands of the FBI?  That was a mjor slip up by a reporter who is probably himself implanted with a chip that was malfunctioning.

This pilot was a highly regimented professional, but what he didn’t know was that he was implanted with an alien chip which was removed earlier today by surgeons at an undisclosed Texas hospital.”

There are a rash of chip meltdowns lately — a few have taken place in the air and many have taken place in the news media.

More info as the story comes in.

Regarding the death of Trayvon Martin and the whole Geraldo hoodie thing — lemme say this about that:

The old saying, “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck,” no longer applies. I personally do not agree with Geraldo because I think that Zimmerman was looking for “action” but these days, the nicest kids you could ever want to know dress like they stepped out of Attica, and if even if they’re on their way home from choir practice, there will always be the neighborhood weirdo — the weird guy with the police scanner and all the Dog The Bounty Hunter accouterments who is looking to save the world — and he’ll be waiting. Sometimes we will thank him and other times we will despise him. This story is very sad on so many levels — but who the heck cares what Geraldo says?

   The stupid story going around on Facebook about a woman who had a lot of guns in her car when stopped by a Minnsesota state trooper for a traffic violtaion is a complete hoax.  As a matter of fact, it’s such a hoax that the picture that is being circulated on facebook with a photo of a woman has come under fire because it’s a photo from a family photo of a Mrs. Abagail Armstrong who died in 2002 at age 94 and never had a car or a driver’s license.  The Facebooke “sharers” are truly being fooled – are you one of them?

The story is funny — BUT TOTALLY FALSE!

“I received a message from a friend that pictures of my mother were circulating on Facebook,” said Peter Armstrong, 76, a former Air Force officer and retired airline pilot who lives in San Diego, California USA.

“I instantly thought that perhaps my children or grandchildren had put up  a picture and it somehow got to my friend.  He told me that this was not the case and that I should have a look at it and that I was not going to like it.  Since I do not have a Facebook account, he sent me an email with the photo of my mother and the strange story that went along with it.  I was shocked. 

“That picture was taken at a family reunion in the fall of 2000 by a professional photographer my brother and I had hired because my mother was there with her three sisters and each of them were in their nineties.  This picture is one he took of my mother and a black and white reproduction of the original photo which actually hangs in my living room and each of my children has one as well.  The photo really captured my mother’s face and personality.” 

Armstrong then fired off a call to the photographer only to find that the business was now owned by a different person entirely and that the original photographer, Arial-Hin Arcevo, had returned to his home in Thailand.  The new owner told Armstrong that he was not surprised that a photo of his mother was circulating on the internet.

“I was told that Mr. Arcevo had a good business going in Thailand of selling images of ordinary people for use in greeting cards and other things for public use on the internet.  He was in business here for a long time and in  that time he must have assembled a lot of images.  If he needs an old Asian woman, he has a picture of one and in this case he needed a picture of a grandmotherly American old lady, so my mom’s picture was the one he used.  According to the police in Thailand, what he is doing is not illegal but his images sell to internet sites and other outlets for over $200 or more.”

“My mother had a great sense of humor and was a jolly laugher, but to have people think that my mother was really a gun toting, foul mouthed old lady really hurts.  She would not have liked this at all.  She was diagnosed with congestive heart failure and she died on the Fourth of July in 2002.  One of the things she told me when I visited her was that she hoped people would remember her.  I don’t think this Facebook thing is what she had in mind.”