You might be able to reconstruct it using Google Cache if you act quickly. Here is your Bill Cortelyou post, but my response indicating that he lived in my ward is not there:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:mdvJwtmtzU8J:indybooks.blogspot.com/2005/08/im-not-first.html+cortelyou+site:http://indybooks.blogspot.com/&hl=en

I did not have all the posts backed up, so it is not completely reconstructed. If you emailed yourself a post that has not been restored, send it to me, or post it as a comment somewhere and I’ll put it back on.

Why did you take down the post about Bill Cortelyou?

Shalom.

Greenie.

P.S. Most of you have seen it, but if you haven’t, check out my blog at indybooks.blogspot.com for ideas on finding people. I finally gave out an English Book of Mormon to a native English-speaker.

I love it. Just think I can do my missionary work without the work.

Visiting members could be very useful in my Latin American mission. People there visited one another spontaneously, so if we dropped in on someone we knew, there was a good chance of getting to meet and talk with another guest. Most “working with the members” in the U.S. that I’ve seen, though, amounts to little more than haranguing members to find investigators. If the called missionaries aren’t finding investigators themselves, there isn’t a lead for the uncalled missionaries to follow. And we have to reach people who aren’t so lucky as to have a Mormon friend.

I like the DVD idea. We spend so much time telling people “We have a message. We have a message.” Some of that effort can be expended actually telling the message.

This morning in my mailbox there was a Priority Mail envelope. That’s $3.85 in postage plus the cost of the USPS cardboard mailer. It was from Branchburg, NJ, which seemed dubious, but who would spend all that money on a mass mailing? It turned out to be an ad from Verizon for fiber optic connections they had recently finished installing in my neigborhood. By investing a little in it, they got me to open it. I didn’t feel tricked because there was some purposeful targeting involved. Suppose every time we completed construction of a building such a mailing were sent to every house within five or ten miles with the meeting schedule and Brother Don’s DVD. It would cost a bit, but every missionary companionship costs over $800 per month in maintenance and another $1600 in lost income.

First, buy advertising time on all networks to announce a halt to tracting. The announcement itself would be made by Jon Heder, in character, dressed in full missionary regalia (complete with an Elder Dynamite nametag). He would say something like…

“So, I guess some of you figured out that I’m probably Mormon. That means it’s about time for me to come knocking on your door to try to tell you about my church. But GOSH, I HATE doing that kind of stuff, so I told them I didn’t want to do it. And they said, ‘well OK, we won’t send guys door to door any more.’ So instead, they made this SWEET DVD that answers all the questions you never dared asked your Mormon friends, like whether they have horns and stuff. So if you want one, just call and well bring one over.”