Welcome! It is Wednesday, 3
July, 2024, and the
time is 23:30 (UTC)…
…or at least it was when the clock was last updated. It doesn't seem to work very well, at least not the whole time.
My name is CJMoss, and I am a teacher, mainly of English, but also French. My home base is currently Bolton, Ontario, although I wind up in interesting parts of the world now and again in connection with my work teaching English.
One of the great joys in my life is travelling. I have been to five continents – Antarctica and South America are the only ones I haven't visited yet. I've also been to what some geographers regard as a mostly sunken continent called Zealandia, although I stuck mostly to the parts that are still high and dry. I even spent ten years living in China, but oddly, I picked up very little Chinese.
My other interests include, as some may have discerned from my contributions, languages, geography, railways (merging Coupler and Coupling (railway) was fun!), photography (many of the photos I've contributed are my own), offbeat humour as exemplified by (you guessed it) Monty Python, and politics.
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The username? That's my Chinese name, 柯理思 (Kē Lǐsī), which I needed once for a bank account in China. The bank's system couldn't handle foreign names. The first syllable is a common Chinese surname which I was told had no particular meaning (although one dictionary that I looked in said it meant "axe helve"), and the two-syllable "given name" means "logical thought". It was not my own choice, by the way.
I also discovered at one job that I had a Chinese nickname among the Chinese staff at my school. It was 大胡子 (Dà Húzi), which means "Big Beard". I only found out about it when a Chinese colleague sent me an email with this as my surname in the "To" line. She obviously had my name like that in her address book.
I am looking forward to another overseas assignment.
I ought to mention that I am.........
..........
Here are a few pictures that I've contributed to Wikipedia. These are all my own work:
I have translated a good number of articles from German about resistance fighters in Nazi Germany, and others who were unfortunate enough to incur the Nazis' wrath.
I have furthermore created or expanded articles about every municipality in each of the following German districts (Kreise):
"Westerwaldkreis" contained 209 articles.
The one marked with an asterisk (*) is the most recent addition to the list.
I have also expanded or created articles for individual towns here and there, such as Flensburg, Bobingen, Bergen auf Rügen, Gelsenkirchen (major expansion from the German article) and Forchheim (once again translated mainly from the German article).
The Rothaargebirge, Nuremberg U-Bahn, Westerwald, Odenwald and Kellerwald articles are mine, too. All are the result of translations from the German Wikipedia. Moreover, Friedrich Kittler, while a person rather than a place, and the Bombing of Braunschweig in World War II, an event, have claimed their rightful places here in the English Wikipedia thanks to my translating skills.
If you are into translation between English and German (either way), French and German, Spanish and German, Italian and German, Chinese and German or Russian and German I wholeheartedly recommend this link:
Its worst shortcoming, however, is that it cannot deconstruct those long German agglutinations like Lebensversicherungsgesellschaftsbeamtenvereinigungsführungssondergespräch, a reasonably common word (6000+ hits on Google) that I'm sure every German says at least four or five times a week – those with big lungs, anyway. Seriously, though, compounds must sometimes be broken down into their constituent elements and run through the dictionary separately. You then have to work out their combined meaning.
Yes, Germany has several places with this distinction, likely more than I've listed here (these are only incorporated centres). Come to that, it has at least one place whose name is a German preposition. This is Ohne, in case you're interested, whose name means "Without". Now, here are the verb-towns, complete with their translations:
Quite a number of places in Germany have names that mean something quite incongruous, interesting, or just plain weird. Here is a list of some of them. Feel free to choose your favourites:
Perhaps you've noticed a "geographical" streak in those articles that I mentioned. As a traveller, I am very fond of geography (or has my love of geography made me interested in travelling? I'm not quite sure). To that end, I have made maps. Here come a few now (well actually, quite a number)………
If you would like to try your hand at making maps, for Wikipedia or other purposes, I also wholeheartedly recommend this link:
The Outer Harbour East Headland/Leslie Street Spit map up above was made using this site. This site produces maps that can be freely used on Wikipedia. There used to be another one, called "OMC", but it has undergone somebody's idea of "improvements", and is now useless.
Happy mapmaking!
I have been to quite a number of countries. They are as follows:
…and on the map, that looks like this:
What follows is a selection of articles that I have found on Wikipedia – none started by me although I've edited a few – which struck me as odd, funny, extremely esoteric or arcane, or whatever. Here they are...........
And now, just for the hell of it, a whole heap of userboxen………
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The Working Man's Barnstar | ||
I award this Barnstar to Kelisi for hard work making good maps. I just saw your map of the Hebrides, and I was very impressed. Having worked with the same OMC program before myself, I can appreciate what a great amount of trouble you must have gone to to make that map so large, detailed, harmoniously coloured, interesting and informative. Well done! QuartierLatin1968 19:10, 23 February 2006 (UTC) |
The Rosetta Barnstar | ||
For outstanding efforts translating articles about German towns, I award you this Barnstar! Kusma (討論) 22:35, 8 April 2006 (UTC) |
The Graphic Designer's Barnstar | ||
I, Callumm, award you this barnstar for contributing excellent maps to Wikipedia, and inspiring me to create my own. Thank you! Callumm 12:46, 13 October 2007 (UTC) |
Please accept this award in recognition of your contribution on the field of descriptions Germany districts. I've just found out whos' translation i used to retranslate to Russian wiki in Blankenrath. Thank you so much for your job! - Zac Allan (talk) 23:01, 27 May 2011 (UTC) |
The Original Barnstar | |
Your maps are quite helpful and nicely made! Thank you for contributing!! SusiSansei (talk) 22:45, 29 November 2021 (UTC) |
The Death Barnstar | ||
Thank you for your consistent contributions towards improving recent death articles. Regards, --Classicwiki (talk) If you reply to me here, please ping me. 18:44, 30 June 2024 (UTC) |