Where Are They Now?
Even well before my blog restoration project, every now and then I’ve wondered what became of various “main characters” from previous incarnations of my blogging. I thought I’d take a brief tour of what Google has to say about it.
I’m not going to overly identify any of these people, although it wouldn’t take much to figure most of them out. I’ll just reference why they were of any concern to me at the time.
The mayoral candidate’s son
Back on Portland Communique, the son of someone who was both a sitting City Council member and a mayoral candidate popped up in the comments. Later, it was discovered that several other commenters came from the IP address of a law firm which, at least at one point, had had ties to the candidate’s son.
To my recollection, I never managed to determine if these other commenters in fact were sockpuppets or if they were just other people from this law firm. Whatever the case, the connection wasn’t disclosed except by my digging.
He went on to become a public defender and today he is a circuit court judge.
The public relations professional
Sticking with Communique for one more, someone from a local communications firm who’d been doing work for a local developer whose proposal I did not favor also took to the blog’s comments. Eventually this devolved to emailed and posted diatribes that were increasingly personal and ad hominem.
(More or less around the same time, a pseudonymous commenter appeared, starting in what was called the “meltdown thread” revolving around the PR flack. Again using IP addresses, I traced that commenter to a firm with ties to the flack. This commenter wasn’t themselves a sockpuppet, just an interested party.)
At any rate, whatever he did between now and then—and I hasten to note that he’s scrubbed that entire period from his CV, where the time is taken up by something else—he appears to have become, himself, a property developer.
The publicly-funded mayoral city council candidate
After I wrapped up Communique and resumed a personal blog, I still nonetheless occasionally kept up with local or regional things. One of which was an early campaign under Portland’s public financing problem for campaigns for city office.
One of these candidates quickly become embroiled in controversy over use of those funds, and when she adopted/appropriated one of my derisive nicknames for her I had to come up with a different one. Good times.
Ultimately was told she’d misused those public funds and was required to pay them back. She’d since moved out of state and today appears to be an internet-based radio personality.
The high school biology teacher
For a brief, shining moment I was fixated on a biology teacher here in Oregon who’d managed to get himself fired for teaching creationism in class, who despite denying he’d taught creationism in class had taught creationism in class.
Some years later, he attended school to become a physician’s assistant and now operates a “retainer medical practice” (“direct physician care”) outfit called, of all things, Liberty.
These are the big ones that spring to mind whenever I think back on people who briefly became “main characters” during my blogging heydays.
I’ll note here with no small irony that each and every one of them appears to be doing just fine for themselves, and appears as well to be financially self-sufficient, something I’ve never achieved and likely never will.
Maybe I just needed to have been a less ethical person in my early years.