User:Jpgordon

About me
Hi everyone! My name's Josh Gordon. I've got a ton of different interests and possibly interesting experiences that might or might not result in useful and informative additions to Wikipedia. For example, I've worked at IMSAI (my first job out of college), Autodesk (my longest job) and eBay (where I was Chief Engineer) as a programmer; I was lead trumpet for the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo for a couple of years in the '70s; I'm an occasionally working musician in several genres and on several instruments including piano, bass, and ukulele; I've lived in New York City, Alexandria, VA, Munich, Germany, Eugene, Oregon, Tarzana, Berkeley, San Francisco, Carmel-by-the-Sea, and Las Vegas. I now live in Kernville, California, my wife's hometown and my adopted hometown. I spent many years on The Well, for a long time as conference host of several of the most popular forums (Current Events and Politics, for example), and I'm an utter fanatic for encyclopedias and dictionaries of all sorts.

I've collected comic books most of my life, though not much since the '90s -- my old friends kept getting killed off or replaced with children, so to hell with it. I do have a nice collection of original art by John Byrne, Neal Adams, Scott McCloud, and Chris Ware. I also collect photography, and have some lovely prints by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Ruth Bernhard, Paul Caponigro, and Diane Arbus (the "Jewish Giant" was my cousin Eddie Carmel).

TV appearance
I appeared on Antiques Roadshow on the show premiering May 12, 2008. I'm showing some Woody Guthrie drawings my Dad was given when he interviewed Woody for a New York Times story in 1949 or so.

Here's the appearance.

Birds
I'm now maintaining my bird list offsite. These are all birds I've sighted from my home on the Kern River in California. Number 55 is the Summer Tanager; I think I saw the red female morph. Number 56 is the Black-headed grosbeak. Number 57 is the Cedar waxwing. Number 58 is the Spotted Towhee. Number 59 is the Northern mockingbird; they've been absent from the immediate vicinity for well over a decade, but hopefully they are re-establishing their presence. Number 60 is the Common poorwill; we heard it but haven't seen it. I wonder if anyone in the world besides me looks at that page? Let me know if you do; only one person has done so since I started it in 2005 or so.

Administrating
Mostly I'm doing janitorial work around here. It comes naturally to me; I was "code cop" at Autodesk and at eBay, so browsing other people's work is quick, easy, and pleasurable.

I became an administrator on Nov. 26, 2004. I have been named a "monster admin" by a fellow editor at WP:RfAr -- I don't think it was meant as praise, though.

Arbitration Committee
I was named to the Arbitration Committee on December 25, 2006. I resigned a year early; three years is too long. I hated it.
 * And now a decade later (2019), I find myself overwhelmingly relieved not to be part of the governance of this operation.

Therapy
I'm the inventor of the concept Wikipedia is not therapy, though I don't think it should be part of WP:NOT.

Ironically
I'm currently on a crusade against "ironically". And now "interestingly" is also on my list -- I found one sentence starting, "Interestingly and ironically", which was just proof to me that my sword is insufficiently swift. But I'm letting "interestingly" stay in video game and other pop culture sorts of articles, because, really, who cares.

I don't like adverbs in general, it would appear. "Indeed" is now on my list too.

It should be noted
It should be noted that it is noteworthy that it should be mentioned that I also have a bug up my ass about "It should be noted" and other such wastes of bits.

Yet another lower colonic arthropod
Random lists of covers of standards. For example, there are hundreds of recordings by different artists of Over The Rainbow; that's the whole point of a standard -- it gets recorded a lot. So there's no need for Over the Rainbow to have a list of artists that have covered the song; it suffices to say the song has been widely covered, and pick out a few that are notable such as Bruddah Iz. And for gosh sake, lets not have a list including episodes of TV shows that have included the songs. Criminy.

Is mentioned in
Popular culture sections are bad enough trivia collections as is, but I do draw the line at "The topic of this article is mentioned in Episode #23 of The Fanboy Webcomic". "Is mentioned in" is an immediate clue that the rest of the sentence is subtrivia.

Then-
When you're talking about something that happened 150 years ago, do you really need to refer to Lincoln as "then-President Lincoln"? New sport: thenectomy.

Openly
I'm tired of seeing "openly gay" for contemporary BLP subjects. There are a contexts where it might be appropriate, such as in countries where it's a serious risk to be publicly identified as gay and the subject is unusual for being "openly" gay. But we don't refer to living people as gay unless they have self-identified as such, under WP:BLP; if we're going to mention someone is gay, then they of course are "openly" gay. Times have changed, and this is a place where we can actually reflect that change by our editorial choices without any risk of violating NPOV.

Including XX women and children
A good example of really pointless text: in Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, we find the building was the target of the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people, 19 of whom were children under the age of six. This might be language you'd see in tabloids and such, but I don't see what's in the least bit encyclopedic about such blather. How many were under the age of 10? How many were under the age of 18? How many were over 70? What's the point of this verbiage?

New bugaboo! "Convicted felon"
I think "convicted felon" almost never belongs in a BLP lede. We should be either more specific when it's an critical part of their biography (Harvey Weinstein gets "convicted sex offender", Ted Kaczynski gets "domestic terrorist"). But "convicted felon" doesn't really impart any illumination.

Kwanzaa pool
I'm thinking it would be odd fun to have a Kwanzaa pool. How early in the season will the idiots start vandalizing Kwanzaa? My definition would be the first edit that warrants a RBI.

International Travels
I had the privilege and pleasure of making two Atlantic crossings, in the SS United States and the SS America.

Precious
You are recipient no. 2593 of Precious, a prize of QAI. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:03, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

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 * It is now July 29 2024 UTC (purge)