In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Best of Both Worlds, Part I”, Commander William Riker is offered command of the Starship Melbourne, and Captain Jean-Luc Picard does all but push him out the door: “Number One… what the Hell are you still doing here?!”
Picard is captured by the Borg at the conclusion of that episode, and in “Part II” Riker is field-promoted to captain of the Enterprise. Later, the Enterprise arrives to witness the aftermath of the Borg attack on the fleet at Wolf 359, and the Melbourne is among the 40 ships whose burned-out hulks now float around that solar system like the bones of an elephant graveyard.
Rikers Island complex, located next o La Guardia Airport, is New York City’s main jail. Its average daily inmate population is about 14,000. The daytime population (including staff) can be 20,000 or more. It is not a prison, which typically holds offenders serving longer-term sentences.
“Gaol” is an old alternative English spelling of “jail”. The word is used as a plot point in one of Dorothy L. Sayers’ short stories involving Montague Egg, a travelling salesman of wines and spirits.
Ellen Crosby’s Wine Country mysteries all have alliterative titles based on types of wine:
The Merlot Murders
The Chardonnay Charade
The Bordeaux Betrayal
The Riesling Retribution
The Viognier Vendetta a/k/a The Vintage Vendetta
The Sauvignon Secret
The original point of historical divergence in the original Alan Moore graphic novel V for Vendetta was the defeat of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party by Labour after just a single term.
Kirk R. Thatcher is a writer and director for Henson Associates, working on various Muppet projects over the years. However, his is most famous for a nonspeaking role in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, where he played the punk on the buswho won’t turn off his boom box, and is the recipient of a Vulcan neck pinch, to the applause of the other riders.
Margaratet Thatcher’s son, Mark, played a role in an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea, for which he was fined 3 milliion South African rand (US$350,000) and received a four-year suspended jail sentence.
Ayn Rand, inspiration to many recent American right-wingers, took Dexedrine most of her life. She is famous for philosophical ideas like “A person who exists only for the sake of his loved one is not an independent entity, but a spiritual parasite. The love of a parasite is worth nothing.”
The Douglas Aircraft Company was an American aerospace manufacturer based in Long Beach, California (near Los Angeles). The company manufactured several airplanes including the Douglas B-26 Invader (not to be confused with the Martin B-26 Marauder), a light attack bomber that saw service in WWII, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. A number of them still survive, including 23 of them which are reportedly still airworthy.
ETA: “reportedly” and “near Los Angeles” since I was Ninja’d by septimus.
Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan used to regularly fly out of Daugherty Field, which later became Long Beach Airport. Before his infamous flight from Brooklyn, New York to Ireland in 1938, he had already flown a transcontinental flight from Long Beach to New York. He was supposed to be returning to Daugherty Field after authorities had refused his request to fly on to Ireland, but because of a claimed navigational error (snicker) he ended up in Ireland instead.
In 1946, Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan was the Prohibitionist Party’s candidate for the U.S. Senate in the state of California. He received a whopping 2% of the vote.
Dr. Patrick D. Maguire received his undergraduate degree in English literature from Haverford College and his MD from Penn State College of Medicine, where he won the Medical Student Humanitarian Award in 1994. He completed his cancer specialty training at Duke University Medical Center. Thereafter, he has been caring for patients with cancer at Coastal Carolina Radiation Oncology (http://www.ccradonc.com/). He received an American Cancer Society “Silent Angel” Award in 2006. Dr. Maguire has published multiple scientific articles on the treatment of cancers including those of the head and neck, lung, prostate, and soft tissues. He is the leader of two multi-million dollar grants awarded by the National Cancer Institute to improve cancer outcomes for African Americans, the poor, and the elderly.