User:Dvd Avins

Hi. My name is Dvd Avins -- the first name being an ad hoc Roman-Alphabet representation of the Hebrew version of "David." It's pronounced similarly to the Russian, Greek, French, and Spanish (and other) versions of the name. In the modern version of Hebrew that I learned very little of, the accent is on the last syllable. I suppose most of my Ashkenazi ancestors (whose dialect I learned even less of) would have put the accent on the first.

From 1972 (at the age of 12) through 1994, I spent most of my time being active in electoral and issue-group politics, mostly in New Jersey. Among other things, I was President of my <insert County-Name with nearly a million people> County Young <insert Political-Party-Name>s and twice the Chair of the <insert Municipality-Name with about 40,000 people> <insert Party name> Party. I was also the County Coordinator for several state-wide primary campaigns. On Wikipedia, I'm putting some of what was common knowledge among New Jersey politically active people in the 1970s and 1980s into the permanent electronic global database that is the Web.

Most of what I'm writing is simple Boolean information. Either so-and-so did get his party's nomination for a given office in a given year, or he didn't. But some of what I'm writing is reports of the reputations of politicians at the time. These characterizations are theoretically referencable, but would require more digging through old newspapers than I currently have time for. Some of them may be corroborated by old editions of The Almanac of American Politics, which I used to devour on a biennial basis.

I didn't leave out my location and Party information above to be coy; if anyone really wants to know, I'll tell them. But I hope that without such prior knowledge, nothing I write here will make it obvious what my personal opinions really are. I left the information out so that if you do find anything POV so that you can tell which party, you'll let me know. On the other hand, if you can tell which party just because I have more knowledge about them or because you see what I've written away from Wikipedia, please don't use that to make spurious attacks about NPOV.

I've also been a tournament chess player, sabermetrician, programmer at the NYSE (including on 9/11/2001), math teacher in an inner-city school, and many other things.