Prolly gonna be my favorite “weird news” story of the year; this is just wonderfully, beautifully absurd:
Kudos to The True Josh Swain for starting the event and a huge CONGRATULATIONS! to Josh Vinson, Jr. for capturing the crown!
Holy crap this picture is perfect, it seems to encapsulate most Joshes I’ve known in my lifetime.
This should be in the encyclopedia entry for Josh. It is the Proto-Josh.
What were the entry requirements? Names like Josh or Joshua were ok, I’m sure. But how about Yeshua, or Jesus? Or Joshshica? Joshlene? Joshkosh?
Who knows? Who cares? … a 4 year old won the pool noodle competition so they all had the right idea.
Cytop (Pronounced Jo-sh|ua)
I’m pretty sure the entry requirement was just “do people call you Josh?”
What a fun event! I love that people do stuff like this randomly.
I agree that he could be the Proto-Josh.
Because they also deserves to be celebrated and memorialized, here is the Ultimate Josh (Joshua Vinson, Jr.) being presented to the crowd of Joshes by the True Josh Swain:
A UK festival -sadly no longer running- that I once went to did an annual ‘Dave-off’, where all the Daves were invited to compete for the right to the name, mainly by sock-wrestling (trying to remove the opponent’s socks while retaining one’s own), with all the losers being issued a new name, at least for the duration of the festival. I think that started in the early 2000s.
I wonder if the initial Josh had come across it…
Damn.
I mean, speaking as a Josh… add a few years, some gray hair, and more than a few pounds, and that could be me. The hair, the beard, the glasses, the dorky pose - it’s like looking in a mirror.
Truly, the Josh is strong in that one.
The humor work The 80s: A Look Back at the Tumultuous Decade 1980–1989 featured some pages from Fred Magazine: the magazine for people named Fred.
The advice column (“Ask Fred”) featured a family which had only had true Freds for generations, and now their daughter was engaged to a guy who went as Fred so tehthought all was good, but subsequently and to their horror he turned out to be really named Alfred! What to do? (I don’t remember most of Fred’s advice, but he ended off with “… but if your future son-in-law is a Fred in need, he’s a Fred indeed.”)