Is “Ricky” actually his first name, or a nickname based on his last name?
Wikipedia says:
So Ricky is a plausible nickname for both Ricardo and Enrique - but I lean towards it being a nickname for Enrique.
Speaking of names, I caught a bit of the Conehead movie yesterday. The family is Beldar, Prymaat and Connie - and until yesterday, I thought the joke was that Connie is a very normal name compared to her parents’ names - but of course, “Connie” is also very close to “Cone”
And they gave Ethel three different middle names in three different episodes. Nobody cared about continuity in the 1950s.
I’d still like to think they changed from Ricardo to Enrique because somebody didn’t want him named Ricardo Ricardo.
The Blade Runner - Aliens Movies connections are hinted at explicitly in these movies. Most of us fans of these two “universes” started by Ridley Scott probably have heard they are supposed to be the same universe. I had heard that but did not realize the explicit connections until closer study.
In one of the street scenes in the original Blade Runner, there’s this noisy foghorn sound, emanating from a weird, lit-up blimp thing traveling along wires (IIRC). After the noisy blast, you hear an announcer’s voice extolling the virtues of traveling to the “off-world colonies!” paraphrasing: “…where a new life awaits you in a golden land of opportunity and adventure…”
Of course, these include some dangerous places where colononists encounter xenomorphs from the Aliens movies.
And in Alien Resurrection, a couple of the characters are complaining about having to visit Earth, which in their opinion was a garbage dump.
Meanwhile, I heard yet another movie is supposed to be in this universe: Soldier, starring Kurt Russell. There, he is literally discarded onto a garbage heap on a waste planet (but not Earth). No xenomorphs there, fortunately.
Actually, keeping the “Alberto Fernando” and “y de Acha” is a lot more consistency than usual for a TV show.
Another reason to suppose that the change was deliberately made to eliminate Ricardo rather than forgetting what they had said before, as with Ethel.
I think it was about the 1000th time through the Beatles’ white album that I realised the numerology in the sequencing.
Side 1 has 8 tracks. 8 letters in Harrison.
Side 2 has 9 tracks. 9 letters in McCartney.
Side 3 has 7 tracks. 7 letters in Starkey.
Side 4 has 6 tracks. 6 letters in Lennon.
“Zoo-umph whack bonk growl” seems to be the first line.
Desi Arnaz’s full name was Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III.
That’s taken more or less directly from the original novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which was published about a decade before the film Alien came out. The Blade Runner/Alien shared universe idea is a fun fan theory, but there’s no textual support in either film for the connection, other than some very broad thematic stuff. There’s since been some ancillary stuff that’s made an explicit connection (comics and stuff like that) but neither film was conceived as being connected to the other.
One of my phone game apps has a character named Evilyn and I thought it was an unusual spelling of the name, but oh well- people spell names all kinds of ways. It’s the sort of deal where she’s supposed to be a good guy, but is secretly a bad guy and I caught on to that part pretty quickly, but it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that it’s spelled “Evil yn” because she’s evil, not just as a weird aesthetic choice. 
“The boggies hadn’t noticed that the pretty Nattily Wood had gradually changed and become the crochety old Evilyn.”
In the precise opposite of that, it took me years before I realized that the He-Man villain Evil-Lyn’s name was a play on the name “Evelyn.”
Two that finally occurred to me today, after literal decades:
In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, trolls have names based on or suggestive of rocks: Chalky, Chrysoprase, Jade, Detritus. Occasional mention is made of a team of troll jewel thieves - the De Bris gang. For some reason, I always parsed that as a reference to De Beers; it was only last night that I finally realized the incredibly obvious: “De Bris” = “debris”. 🤦
Been listening to Kris Kristofferson since I was a child. One of my favorite songs is “Casey’s Last Ride”, which describes a lonely man getting on the London Underground and later drinking a pint in a pub. In between the those verses are two verses in the words of an ex-girlfriend, with whom he’s clearly had an assignation:
" ‘Oh,’ she said, "I suppose you seldom think about me,’
‘Now,’ she said, "now that you’ve a family of your own;’
‘Still,’ she said, ‘it’s so blessed good to feel your body.’
‘Lord,’ she said, ‘Casey, it’s a shame to be alone’
I’d always thought “Casey’s Last Ride” referred to his trip on the Tube. But maybe there’s a double meaning. The song is set in Britain, where “a ride” is slang for sex. Kristofferson was a Rhodes Scholar, and perhaps knew the term, and intentionally used a double entendre in the song’s title.
Did you notice that the troll who works for the band (in Soul Music) is named “Asphalt”?
That one I got, as well as “Brick”, the young city-born troll Detritus mentors in Thud. I just can’t believe it took me so long to notice something so obvious as De Bris/debris.
A friend of mine didn’t notice the city of the gods named “Dunmanifestin”
The ending to A.I. Artificial Intelligence is dark. I figured it out after putting two pieces of information together: (1) it originated as a Stanley Kubrick project and (2) Spielberg (allegedly, in his own words) kept essentially the same ending as Kubrick envisioned. This seemed implausible to me on first hearing, because Kubrick was not one known for happy endings.
Taken at face value, it’s a happy ending where the mom character is somehow resurrected with just a single hair to go off of. Not only is it overly saccharine, it’s downright preposterous, the idea that they could pull someone out of the ether (and only once! and only for a day!) like that, consciousness and all. But they (the filmmakers) play it straight and I took it straight the first few times I viewed it. But then, putting those two unspoilered pieces of information together, it occurred to me that the sentient robots in the film are actually just manufacturing a fairytale ending for the kid (as opposed to Kubrick, in his original vision, manufacturing a happy ending for the viewer–whether or not Spielberg and company picked up on that is beyond me). And when the kid gets his “fairytale” ending, having perhaps doubled as a test of cognitive ability that he has failed, the truly sentient AI… put him to sleep. For, like, ever.
This happened just last night.
I love “The Book of Mormon” (musical, not book!) Of course pretty much every song in there is taken from a Broadway model. But I always thought “Joseph Smith American Prophet” where the Ugandans recount the history of the religion was just made up. And hilarious.
Last night I finished watching “The King and I” after a gap of about 65 years. When I came to “The Small House of Uncle Thomas” the origin of the Book of Mormon song became clear.
Yes 65 years. When I was very young (pre-K) I stayed with a great aunt who took me to see it at Radio City Music Hall where it opened in NY. The boat from the king in the initial scene scared the crap out of me and we left. I didn’t whistle a happy tune, obviously.