The Free View-- weblog of a presidential candidate

Testimonials from friends, blasts from the past, and I get referenced

I bumped into an old friend of mine -- Kurt -- on the web. He's a journalist now, and I found myself reading an article he wrote recently about the California recall candidates' web sites. Kurt and I actually perfomed together in a talent show at a program called CTY -- sort of camp for young brainiacs, held at a number of college campuses each summer -- about 17 years ago or so. (BTW, if you are a young brainiac, or parent of one, I highly recommend CTY.)

So after I e-mailed Kurt and said "Hi, remember me?", and he wrote back, he then found his way to this site, and was prompted to write again with some encouraging comments. You can see them in slightly-edited format over in the testimonial/comments section on the left, but here they are in full:

I've also been reading some of the political content at freedom2008.com, and find it damn interesting. I am nominally a Democrat, but have never been seriously politically active, mainly because I'm fed up with a lot of what the major parties say and do. (In short, I'm probably the kind of voter "third" or "other" parties are trying to engage -- you could say I'm looking for an intelligent alternative.)

Very interesting.

Needless to say, comments like that make my day. :-)

This next item's not new, but it's cool, and I've never posted about it. Adam Graham, who worked for PeoplesForum.com as a contract newsletter writer for a little over a year, has an interesting page on his web site where he writes about his past jobs, and what he liked and disliked about them. Here's his entry about working under me for PeoplesForum.com:

Peoplesforum.com

Employer Rating: 4 Stars

I guess I did help make him a better writer, because I only see three nitpicky errors in his entry. ;-)

Adam's assessment is probably kind, really. I'm a pretty blunt writing critic, and when something's going out under my name or my company's name...well, I call it "improvementist" instead of "perfectionist", but many people would see it as the same thing. Actually, the Army Sergeant comparison is probably pretty on-target. To Adam's credit, he kept at it, and he definitely improved. Working with Adam was interesting, in a number of ways. One, because I've never met him in person -- I knew him for years before I heard his voice, and it was only yesterday that I first saw what he looks like. Two, because he's a very conservative, very religious person, and I'm...well...let's say, really open-minded. That's reflected a bit in his summary above, as you can see.

He also features this site on his links page, and finding his comments about it again inspired me to finally add it to the testimonials section. It's a great testimonial -- it cracks me up. Here it is:

This is the blog belonging to my former boss and aspiring President of the United States. I remain pledged to moving to Ireland if he actually wins but still it's an interesting site.

It's over on the left now along with Kurt's comments.

Now we step a little farther into the abstract, to a page I found when trying to dig up all the news links in the last entry. It's on the site of a person named Tian, who I met at Burning Man in 2000. He lived in the same neighborhood as I did that year -- if I recall correctly, he was campaigning evangelizing passionately for Ralph Nader. And two of his campmates went home with "Lance Brown for President" t-shirts (three campmates really, because one shirt went to a couple.)

The reason we're talking about Tian right now is because he talks about me, on his site. I come up on three pages, actually. On this page, you can see a picture of the big sign from my "Burn Your Man" camp. You can't read the whole sign, but Tian explains the process enough that it should make some sense, in a surreal temporary-city-in-the-desert kind of way. If not, then you can click on that picture, or this link. There you'll see a picture of me, looking very casual and sunburned in my trusty campaign t-shirt, along with a caption about my campaign, and some pictures and comments about the project at my camp. The third relevant page is this one, where you can see the three people who got Freedom2008.com t-shirts (in the second picture down, doing an Iwojima-flag-raising imitation), and a passing comment about me about two-thirds of the way down the page, under a picture of Carlos (in the red robe and black hat). He was, as the caption says, that camp's "token Libertarian", and so he and I got along well naturally. And I did give him a campaign shirt, as the caption also says.

Thanks to Tian for a tiny snip of documentary footage of Lance: On the Campaign Trail, as it were. ;-) Oh, and one last little bit from there -- the street sign in this photo (8:00/Heart) is currently in my front yard. And while we're getting silly, the basketball hoop, dart board, and balloon hanging from the sign were all mine too. Ah, nostalgia.

If you're familiar with Burning Man, then that series of pages probably didn't startle you too much. If you're not aware of it, then it probably seems freaky and a bit silly. It is -- but in a good way. If you don't believe me, go yourself and find out. It's happening right now, so you're too late this year -- you'll have to start planning for next year.

I also found two places on the web that had referenced me which I hadn't been aware of previously. The first was in Viking Ventures, the student newspaper of Cape Henlopen High School in Lewes, Delaware, back in January of this year. Sarah Murray wrote an article about high school cliques, and she quoted from my Boston Public: The Case Against Schools essay. This was neat to see.

And lastly, a quote from me was listed on this page of quotes about the death penalty. The coolest part about finding this was seeing myself quoted next to Martin Luther King, Jr. That's a first for me -- and it feels good.