The Big Bang Theory’s Leonard Hofstadter has an IQ of 173, and was 24 years old when he received a PhD from Princeton University in theoretical physics.He also received a dissertation of the year award for his doctoral paper on experimental particle physics.[18]
Leonard has been established to have been a child prodigy, and a gifted scientist with an impressive knowledge of theoretical physics. He designs experiments in order to test theories but, according to Sheldon Cooper, his work is mostly derivative and thus unimportant.
James T. Kirk was such a serious student in his days at Starfleet Academy, he tells his friend and colleague Dr. Leonard H. McCoy in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Shore Leave,” that he was “positively grim.”
During the 1976 NFL season, the Green Bay Packers had two players named Mike McCoy. One was a defensive tackle, in his seventh and final season with the team, and the other was a rookie defensive back.
On 15 September 1963 the San Francisco Giants had all three outfielders who all had the same last name. They were brothers: Felipe Alou, then 28, was a regular outfielder for the Giants; Matty Alou, 24, was a defensive replacement and pinch hitter who started only six games; and Jesus Alou, 21, was a September call-up.
They played in the same outfield for a few innings in three games in September. In spite of some lingering baseball mythology, they never all started a game together.
According to Wikipedia, there are currently seven mascot names that are shared by North American professional sports franchises.
The list is as follows:
Cardinals – Arizona (football), St. Louis (baseball)
Giants – San Francisco (baseball), New York (football)
Jets – New York (football), Winnipeg (hockey)
Kings – Los Angeles (hockey), Sacramento (basketball)
Lions – Detroit (football), British Columbia (Canadian football)
Panthers – Florida (hockey), Carolina (football)
Rangers – New York (hockey), Texas (baseball)
Until mismanagement brought them down in 1996, ending a competitive period of over a century, the Ottawa Rough Riders of the Canadian Football League shared a homophonic nickname with the Saskatchewan Roughriders.
The origins were different, however. The Ottawa name is believed to have been a reference to the loggers who rode rafts of logs down the rivers to Ottawa, while the Saskatchewan Roughriders refer to hard riding cattle drives.
The Saskatchewan name may have the same root origin as Teddy Roosevelt’s Roughriders: North Dakota, where Teddy had his ranch, borders on Saskatchewan, and the two areas have similar geography and ranching history.
The Detroit Lions and the BC Lions have the same nickname, but judging by their logos, Detroit is referring to an African, maned, lion, while BC’s logo is a mountain lion.
Theodore Roosevelt did not like the nickname “Teddy.” Members of his close family often called him “Teedy,” his childhood nickname. After he left the White House, he was often referred to in social situations as “the Colonel,” reflecting his Army rank at the end of the Spanish-American War.
In the play (and later, the film) Arsenic and Old Lace, the protagonist, Mortimer Brewster, has a brother named Teddy, who is under the delusion that he is actually Teddy Roosevelt.
Mortimer and Teddy’s elderly aunts, Abby and Martha, have been poisoning lonely old bachelors to put them out of their misery, and have been having Teddy bury the bodies in the basement, as he believes that they are workers who have died from yellow fever while digging the Panama Canal.
Most of the laborers who built the Panama Canal were Jamaicans and Barbadians of African descent, who were wrongly thought to have elevated immunity to the yellow fever, malaria, and other tropical diseases that were endemic to the area (and also helped end the earlier French project).
The Panama Canal, which opened in 1914, has a total length of about 51 miles from one ocean to the other. 21 miles of the overall length are in Gatun Lake, which was created in 1913 by the building of the Gatun Dam across the Chagres River.
Thanks, Bullitt. I’d mentioned in an earlier post here that Dr. McCoy’s middle name was not established Star Trek canon. He mentioned his middle initial in the movie Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
In play:
American historian David McCullough’s book The Path Between the Seas, about the politics, diplomacy, funding, design and construction of the Panama Canal, was credited by President Jimmy Carter and many on Capitol Hill with smoothing the way for the 1977 treaties by which the United States turned control of the canal over to Panama in 1999.
McCullough’s bio of the second US President, John Adams, was originally planned as a dual biography of Adams and Jefferson. However, the more he worked on it, the more McCullough found himself drawn to Adams and actually disliking Jefferson, so it became a bio of Adams alone.
The Ladies of Missalonghi, a 1987 novel by Australian writer Colleen McCullough, very closely resembles The Blue Castle, a 1926 novel by Canadian L.M. Montgomery, best known as the author of Anne of Green Gables. The plot and character details are nearly identical. In response to allegations of plagiarism, McCullough first said that she was too intelligent and creative to need to plagiarize, and then gave a defense of subconscious recollection.
David McCullough is, like me, a graduate of Shady Side Academy in Fox Chapel, Pa., just outside of Pittsburgh. He now lives in Boston and Cape Cod. During the 2016 campaign, he, Ken Burns and several dozen other prominent American historians formed a group which was harshly critical of Donald Trump.