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Abel to Yzerman

Girls Gone Woooooooo….The Ladies Behind ThePensBlog

by IwoCPO on 05/30/09 at 10:00 AM ET
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I’ve been fooled like the rest of you.  For nearly two years I’ve been corresponding with them, exchanging “jobs”.  During the playoffs? Not so much. Pretty tense in both camps so…the wit gets degraded a bit.

But during the regular season, after a Wing loss in November or December, an email from Pensblog Staff would show up with a simple, “woooooo”.  And that was funny. It was good.

Now?  I’m a little shaken by what the interns have found.  What follows is a result of their 55 hour investigation.  What follows is an A2Y exclusive.

Thursday, 28 May.  ThePensBlog.

I throw a right to the back of his head which knocks him about 10 feet forward (later, some witnesses argued if it was a push or a punch and one of them claimed it was a “push” because “there’s no way a punch makes someone move that far”). He turns around and comes toward me. But he isn’t looking at me. He is targeting someone else. He throws a punch…

It lands on his target. I turn to see who he hit. I think “Great, now Smitty (my buddy) is hit”.

...But I was wrong…

The son of a bitch cracked my wife in the face.

“KILL HIM, HE MUST DIE.”

He charges at me and tries to tackle me around the waste. I am 6’3” about 3 bills. I drop a people’s elbow into his neck.

This is what launched our investigation.  So ridiculous, so astoundingly stupid, that it went beyond what we were used to seeing even at PensBlog.  How “Derek” and “Adam” could have possibly let that slip, to publish without proper verification, to actually give credence…it made us start to wonder.  It perked the ears of the interns. 

They didn’t stop there.  Other indicators in the same post gave the interns pause.  Out of nowhere, just dropped in the middle of a long post full of amazing photoshop artistry and after 17 “wooooooo’s”, was…this.

Then this, from “Adam” or “Derek”....

A classy move. And with that, The Acid Queen saga comes to an end. It sure was a sweet ride.

After nearly two years of intense hate, two years of lobbing insults dealing with hygiene, weight, innuendo of the most obscene variety…all of a sudden a Pens victory over AQ’s Hurricanes prompts that? 

At at a time when the interns expected to read nothing but the most exceptional “jobbing” possible on TpB, they were seeing nothing but idiotic fiction from a guy claiming to go “3 bills” and pounding a 145lb man into submission after his wife was punched in the face but still happy to tailgate with his buds in the parking lot after missing Thid pot the game winner while the sad Cane fan wandered off into oblivion….run on, run on.  God.  And then the Acid Queen/PensBlog reconcilliation out of nowhere.

So the interns kept digging.  Reading old posts, following comment trails, analyzing cbloggers, their trends, their choice of words…their motivations.

And they went on location.  Their budget was limitless.  They started out with no real endstate in mind, only a resolution to their suspicion that something was amiss at PensBlog. When their investigation ended yesterday afternoon, their disturbing goal was clear and it was realized:  “‘Adam and Derek” aren’t who they say they are.  PensBlog, while awesome in its creativity and its reach, was a fraud waiting to be exposed.

The interns, driven by disappointment as they are all young, all impressionable and each of them PensBlog fans and readers, were crushed when they discovered this: “Adam” and “Derek”, the largely anonymous, never photographed, selectively private and most definitely reclusive founders are not the “twenty something” post or current college young men they’ve led their Cbloggers to believe they are.

Point of fact, they are Blanche Veryzer and Bunny Wagner. PensBlog was founded and is still being written and operated by two housewives from Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania.

Bunny is “Derek” and she’s on the left. Blanche is “Adam” and she is on the right.  Pens fans? Yes.  Most certainly.  Scared and more than a little bitter?  Without question.  This investigation is for them.  In a very short period of time we’ve come to see them for who they are: two bored women who started something on a whim, enjoyed amazing but anonymous adoration from a group of minions waiting for leadership, and then extreme fright that their worlds would crash down around them.

After reading the idiotic account of “Daddy 3 Bills” as the ass kicking cblogger has come to be known here, the interns ravaged every post they could find at Pensblog. Poured over it, looking for the slightest indication of fraud.  They found little.  Actually, looking back they found a lot.  But it wasn’t until their search took them right back here to A2Y that they began to understand the scope of the fraud, the layers they’d have to peel back.

June 5th, 2008.  A2Y: And So The Battle Ends

Wooooooo….OMG I hate that fu&^ing word.

Soon.  Soon you’ll all know the truth.

Posted by Bunny from Cranberry, PA on 06/05/08 at 01:13 PM ET

“I saw that. I remember seeing it,” said the Delta College intern.  “But at the time we were so pumped about the Cup. It just didn’t sink in. Damn.”

Well, it’s sunk in now.  Friday morning they’d reached that post and Bunny’s comment leapt off the page.  IP tracking, calls to contacts in Cranberry Township, a kickass deal with Jet Blue and next thing you know three interns are knocking on the Wagner front door.

I won’t get into the methods or just how quickly Bunny talked.  There was no waterboarding. No need for congressional oversight or lawyers.  Three interns asking one innocent question, followed by a torrent of tears and an admission that will shake the foundations of hockey blogging.

From the transcript:

Ferris State intern:  “What is your connection to Pens Blog?”

BW: “Dear god.  Dear god.”  (unintelligable)

It literally poured out from there.  Bunny Wagner told practically the whole story in under 6 minutes.  The tape of the conversation, sealed on court orders but releasable in 90 days, is…astounding.  Blanche Veryzer, “Adam”, was never reached.  We never found her, but the interns continue to search. 

According to Bunny, she and Veryzer formed an idea in July 2006.  Bored, restless and Pens fans.  They just wanted an escape.  Just for a few minutes per day.  They considered just taking up Spin Classes but kept looking.  Finally, one afternoon on a shopping trip to Pittsburgh, they saw a young teenage girl appear to trip and fall.  Confused because they saw no reason for the stumble, Wagner and Veryzer approached her only to find she wasn’t a girl at all…but Sidney Crosby, crying, saying “wooooo” over and over.

“It became a private joke between us, between Blanche and me.  But the more we talked about it, the more fun we had with it. We love the Penguins, love Sidney.  We wanted to share that and maybe let people see a side of us no one had before.

So we created ‘Bitch Fest.’  Our first blog.  It was going to be totally dedicated to us and to Sidney.  But within minutes of it appearing on #######.com, St. Louis Blues fans were flooding the site.  We took it down and thought about it some more.”

PensBlog was born that September.  And the women decided there was little chance of gaining a following of Pens fans as two middle aged women from Cranberry.  They became “Derek” and “Adam” and their legend grew.  They wrote little, peppered their site with inane photoshops and before long developed a following.

“Absolute, utter idiots,” said Wagner.  “Blanche and I are not geniuses by any stretch, but the stupidity of our early readers was shocking even to us.”

They found that it took very little to mold their readers.  “Wooooo” became their rallying cry.  “First” was adopted soon after.  Thousands of comments each day, of which maybe six featured a subject/verb combination.

“My god, we loved it so.  They started sending us photoshops and it was….bizarre.  We created phrases, names for the Penguins.  We created a groundswell for a washed up piece of trash and the next thing you know…people are wearing wristbands.” 

According to Wagner, it escalated to the point where the adulation was overwhelming.  But with that anonymous adoration came depression.  They began to despise their aliases.

“We hated ourselves, what we’d become,” said Bunny. “But we couldn’t let it go.We went too far..too far to turn back. It started out as a way to pass the time.  We were curious and then…we just couldn’t stop.  You can’t imagine what it’s like to feel this kind of adulation.  We wanted to go public but it seemed that every day we were reaching more and more people.  Oh my god, the lies.  Our lies. Theirs.  One on top of another.”

The commenters grew closer.  Cblog was formed.  Hundreds of close-knit, passionate, devoted Penguin fans rallying every day behind their two leaders, “Adam” and “Derek”, college-aged young men who were actually Bunny Wagner and Blanche Veryzer, 39 and 42, housewives in Cranberry Township.

A sick circle of lies and blind faith. 

“We were addicted to the ‘woooooooo’.  Completely.  We were on the verge of losing everything. Our families. Our identities as strong middle class women. We were nothing but cyber goddesses in 22 year old male bodies.  Or the other way around.”

It began to crumble last week. The pressure of the Stanley Cup Finals was too much.  The letter from “Daddy 3 Bills” slipped by them both and they started to see the signs.  When Blanche recommended they mend fences with Acid Queen, Bunny easily agreed.  It was then, the day after that they began to understand that the charade was nearing an end.

“Acid Queen? Are you fu**ing kidding me?  At what point would we ever give her anything but the shit she deserves.  God, if I could take one thing back it would be that…I can’t believe we shook her hand. We deserved the shit we took for that.”

Bunny Wagner smiled when she talked about the Acid Queen.  She said she’d miss the venom.  It warmed her.  It warmed Pensblog. 

And she said the revelation of their true identities won’t stop them from continuing Pensblog’s huge success.  It will keep going.  “Adam” and “Derek” will remain.  But the truth is out there, as it should have been long ago. 

And now that it is?

“Wings in 5” said Bunny.  “And the conspiracy?  That’s true too.  We’ve known about it for months.  Bitches.”

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Welcome to Abel to Yzerman, a Red Wing blog since 1977.  No other site on the internet has better-researched, fact-laden and better prepared discussions than A2Y.  Re-phrase: we do little research, find facts and stats highly overrated and claim little to no preparation.  There are 19 readers of A2Y. No more, no less. All of them, except maybe one, are juvenile in nature.  Reminding them of that in the comment section will only encourage them to prove that. Your suggestions and critiques are welcome: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

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