Mayberryfan posted a number of questions to Bonnie Luper. I really hope Bonnie stops by and provides some answers. I have a few more:
What is the purpose of the Magic Chicken Diet site? To make money is obvious, but HOW is this supposed to happen?
How would anybody find the Magic Chicken? There is no advertising.
If you would happen to find it, WHY would you pay $69.95 to join? Based on the front page with Bonnie's pictures and success story? The only other success story is a fuzzy picture of Bonnie's sister. For the most recent addition, Angie, the pictures were not linked properly and do not show up.
Is the Magic Chicken Diet website just a failed "get rich quick" deal? Something that with a minimal investment will yield a high return, with hardly any effort on Bonnie's part? It certainly seems that Bonnie and David have little knowledge of how to edit websites, or how to run an online forum. How could they think that people would magically flock to the MCD, happily pay the membership fee and post away in an empty forum that Bonnie seldom visits?
Are David and Bonnie just incompetent and ignorant? If so, who gave them the idea of an online web support forum in the first place? Clearly, they don't know how to run one.
The MCD story started as follows:
05/02/2007: www.magicchickendiet.com is registered
06/10/2007: GetAFreelancer ad for a Kimkins clone
The WW kimkins article reached stores on 06/12 but would have been in mailboxes a week earlier. Therefore, it is possible that the Lupers did see the kimkins article and decided to recreate the success based on the article and not previous knowledge of kimkins.
However, they had already planned to do something on 05/02 when the site was registered. Bonnie claimed that she was going to write an e-book. Based on her "writings" on the MCD website, I highly doubt it.
07/20/2007: www.magicchickendiet.com is launched. Lifetime membership is $19.95 for the "first 200 members". Bonnie herself doesn't post until 09/11.
Around this time, it seems that Bonnie is very enthusiastic about the Magic Chicken Diet. She takes professional pictures and makes a slide show. She puts up two MySpace profiles with the slide show and additional pictures. The daughter of a friend makes a YouTube video.
A few marketing attempts are made. One Yahoo question, a couple on Craigs List but that's pretty much it.
12/09/2007: Price increase to $69.95 is announced, but still as an "introductory price for the first 200 members". There were about 20 members on the board at that time. What prompted the price increase? I doubt that any of the 20 had paid a dime as they all seemed to live close to Bonnie and most likely were "real life" friends.
Two of the early members with Bonnie are shown in the picture below, taken at Christmas 2007. These are the sisters that Bonnie announced as new success stories in her Christmas greeting on the front page. Pictures of them still haven't made it up on the site.
12/20/2007: The Lupers registered www.chickendiet.net. A few weeks later, some text comes up with google diet links but nothing specific to the Magic Chicken Diet.
01/31/2008: New board software is installed on MCD.com, wiping out the all old posts. All 70 of them.
02/06/2008: The magicchickendiet.net site went bonkers. Bonnie's husband, David, was mocking Bonnie's weight loss and linking to Medusa's, Yucky's and my blog even though we had not recently blogged about the MCD at the time.
AmyB asked Bonnie about it, but Bonnie didn't address the dot net site in her answer.
I doubt Mayberryfan or I will see any answers from Bonnie. But perhaps son-in-law Hulon will stop by and post a comment.
Sunday, March 9, 2008
Magic Chicken Diet Questions
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21 comments:
Mariasol said:
"I doubt Mayberryfan or I will see any answers from Bonnie. But perhaps son-in-law Hulon will stop by and post a comment."
Not if he knows what's good for him! Every time he opens his mouth, his foot pops out.
You ask some GREAT questions, and unfortunately I doubt we'll get answers, either.
But, that doesn't mean we're gonna give up, does it? ;)
Judging from the menu and nutritional content, perhaps they should start calling it the Tragic Chicken Diet!
Excellent post and timeline, Mariasol!
You have an amazing talent. It would not have been an easy task to sort through the convoluted history of the MCD fiasco and put it in a concise and comprehensive timeline.
Let's hope Bonnie rises to the challenge and honestly answers all the nagging questions that surround MCD. Not holding my breath on that, though :^)
My blog: Medusa
I don't know how to post a link, but you can find this by going to "Grilled Cheese Sandwich with Pickles" and typing Hulon Pate into the Google box there. Bottom line: Hulon is a figment of somebody's imagination. If he comes here and posts, please keep that in mind.
___________________________________
BrrrrAAAAWKKKKKKKKKKK!!! MCD update!
Time for a Magic Chicken Diet update.
Some of you may remember a series of impassioned and creatively spelled blog comments left by one "Hulon Pate" who represented himself as the son-in-law of Mr. and Mrs. Magic Chicken Diet.
This should come as a surprise to no one, but "Hulon," whoever and whatever else he may be, is categorically not their son-in-law.
One of my pastimes is genealogy, and if you search the Texas Birth Index, you can see who Mr. and Mrs. Magic Chicken Diet's children are. I'm not posting their names or genders, but there are three of them and none of them is now married or has ever been married to anyone named "Hulon Pate" or any permutation thereof. Those that are married are married to people who are clearly not Hulon Pate, nor has any of them ever been divorced from a Hulon Pate. He may be a boyfriend, an ex-boyfriend, or a friend, but he is not a relative by marriage.
It appears as though Hulon Pate, Devoted Son-In-Law, may in fact, be fiction. At least insofar as his relationship to the Magic Chicken Diet's goes.
I'm shocked!
Elle
Anonymous - I don't know if Hulon is married to Bonnie's daughter Courtney or not, but he at least spent Christmas with her and her kids in 2007. From Hulon's "writings" I have gathered that they were separated for some time during 2007, but are now back together.
hmmm
What happened at the Kimpound on or around 9/11/07? If I remember right, wasn't that around the time the PI caught up with Heidi? For some reason I remember there being some issues on that date. I know that some were irritated at "kimmer" for not recognizing the reason we hold 9/11 so close to our hearts. But, maybe there is more to this date than that. Bonnie makes her FIRST post on HER site on this date. Don't mind me, I'm just thinking "out loud"
ETA - I went back to Sept 07 and looked up the posts written on the kimkins controversy site and wouldn't ya know, MANY MANY things came to light around that very date. Maybe "Bonnie" decided it was time to get that diet of hers up and running.... PRONTO!
kimkinscam - It is intriguing to try to figure out what caused the events. I have been trying to see what happened early December to prompt the price increase, but nothing stands out. If you only have 20 non-paying members @ $19.95, why would you suddenly have an inrush with people signing up at $69.95? Or, perhaps there was something that didn't happen due to us blogging about the MCD?
Mariasol--I didn't know that Hulon was real enough to have spent Christmas with Bonnie's daughter and her kids. I must've missed it when that information came to light.
I assume that you have his IP from when he commented here in December. Is it the same as his IP when he commented at Jimmy's? (In other words, is there any chance that Kimmer is involved in his commenting process as she seems to have been with Margarita's Martini?)
Also, what would have been Hulon's motivation to lie about why the MCD site originally went down? He commented in at least two places that it went down because Kimmer had made a formal complaint to godaddy.com. It turned out that it simply went down because the bills had not been paid. And I've never seen Kimmer railing about how the nasty MCD lady has ripped off her diet. So was this a red herring from Hulon to make us think that there is some kind of animosity between Heidi and Bonnie, when it's more likely that there is some sort of collusion instead?
So many questions. So few recipes for chicken.
Mariasol,
When did Heidi get her accounts frozen? Must have started to hurt by December. And when did Heidi raise the price at KK to $79.95? Funny how MCD's $69.95 falls exactly between KK's previous $59.95 & $79.95.
I bet you're right about something that didn't happen due to us blogging. That may be why there is so much hostility coming our way from the MCD people. We need to keep digging and blogging. Maybe they will shed more light on this - out of frustration, if nothing else. They certainly don't seem eager to come forward and clear up this issue. Makes you wonder.
anonymous - You didn't miss anything as it hasn't been reported. I didn't see any interest to make a blog post about Hulon spending Christmas with his wife.
Thanks for the reminder that Hulon claimed that kimmer had shut them down, I had forgotten about it. It may be an excuse that the Lupers adopted though and fed to Hulon as it might sound better than "we didn't pay the bill". The Luper's also kept up that charade by making minor changes to the front page to make it look a little less than kimkins (red instead of kimkin-green, and different font).
kimkinscam - Kimkins increased the price around Jan 1, 2008. About a month after MCD. Yes, I don't understand the hostility. We provide free PR, something they haven't managed to do on their own. We don't much like the diet, but at least the name is getting known.
Mariasol said, "Thanks for the reminder that Hulon claimed that kimmer had shut them down, I had forgotten about it. It may be an excuse that the Lupers adopted though and fed to Hulon as it might sound better than "we didn't pay the bill."
We know, then, that Hulon wrote all of the comments that appeared on the blogs? Some of the rather-sophisticated language used in the midst of his bad grammar and spelling, sound like Heidi may have been in the mix.
Hulon also said that Bonnie needed the money for surgery to replace the "brest" she lost 18 years ago to breast cancer. On the picture you have posted, Bonnie looks quite symmetrical. Another lie?
anomymous - Good points! I have no idea if this really was Hulon. His ramblings seemed characteristic of his posts in other places though.
Bonnie has repeated the breast cancer thing in several places, but of course, that doesn't mean it's true.
Mariasol you've written an excellent summary of the Magic Chicken Diet saga thus far!
Things that make ya go hmmmm!
Hmmm. I just ran across another picture of Bonnie, pre-weightloss.
http://magicchickendiet.net/?p=9
She's quite symmetrical on that one, too. (The stripes on her shirt help to show it.) She must use an excellent prosthesis company.
About Bonnie's alleged wish for surgery -- why didn't she and her husband use their money for that surgery, instead of spending thousands of dollars and countless resources of time and energy messsing with the MCD and its related sites, blogs, and assorted other bits?
Time and time again they hired freelance coders, only to fire them after some screw up or other, and then hired more, again and again.
They're still doing it -- spending who knows how many thousands of dollars, all the while attempting to garner sympathy for the fact that they need money to pay for Bonnie's surgery.
Another thing we'd like to address is this matter of that godaddy 404 screen back in December -- we're beginning to wonder whether it actually was because the Lupers failed to pay their bill, as indicated by our source's phone conversation with someone at Godaddy, or whether Heidi did have a hand in getting Godaddy to temporarily close the site due to its obvious ripoff of Kimkins.com code.
We've tried to figure out the implication of both scenarios. What would it mean, generally speaking, and what would it mean as concerns the antiKimkins activists specifically if one of Heidi's sources alerted her to Mariasol's discovery of David Luper's ad at getafreelancer regarding the cloning of Kimkins.com?
A third point, as mentioned by one of the anonymous posters above, re "And I've never seen Kimmer railing about how the nasty MCD lady has ripped off her diet."
We never even noticed or thought about that but now that you mention it, it does seem weird. If Heidi had been pissed off enough at the Lupers for cloning the website that she reported them to GoDaddy, she's been strangely silent about the fact that they also seem to have cloned a lot of other Kimkins stuff -- the diet, the TOS, the snarkiness, the photo weirdness, etc.
At any rate, Mariasol, excellent coverage of the MCD situation and fantastic work sorting it all out with such clarity.
Lots of things don't add up, Yucky. Here's another observation:
David's ad at getafreelancer.com discussed PayPal pro, an automatic affiliate links exchange, a buddy finder and being search engine optimized. How did he learn all those terms in the few days after the Woman's World article came out? If he knew to ask for all those things, why are he and Bonnie so manifestly inept at using them? And if you compare David's ad with his ramblings on magicchickendiet.net, you might guess that they were written by two entirely different people.
anonumous said: "two different persons". My guess, and it's just a guess, is that the mcd dot net was written by David II, the son. He seemed to be a little mad at mom at the time.
One of the comments was, "BAD BAD BAD
DO NOT - REPEAT DO NOT let this happen to your obese wife. I woke up one morning to here my dad gummed fluffy wife holler out I AM NOT GOING TO BE FAT ANY MORE! My response: oh, ok honey. Well the next thing that happened was she turned into this."
So you're saying that this was written by David II, the son?
anonymous - When you put it that way - Can I take that back? I agree, it doesn't sound like a son. Guess David I was mad at the time then.
anonymous says "David's ad at getafreelancer.com discussed PayPal pro, an automatic affiliate links exchange, a buddy finder and being search engine optimized. How did he learn all those terms in the few days after the Woman's World article came out?"
wow, great question! This is really weird.
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