My other favorite judge name is the beautifully well-deserved Judge Wisdom. Judge John Minor Wisdom (how cool is that as a full name?) was a judge of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans - the federal court with the greatest oversight over desegregation issues, as it heard appeals from the five Gulf states plus Georgia. Appointed in 1957, he remained on the bench until his death in 1999 at the age of 93. As noted in the link, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1993.
Sure there was a Mother Goose. I’ve been to her grave
But she probably didn’t write any of those tales, at least according to THIS cite:
A popular Suburban Myth, dating to the middle of the nineteenth century, claims that many of the traditional rhymes were written by an American woman from Boston, one Elizabeth Goose, supposedly for her children or grandchildren. Her figure has appeared in wax at San Francisco’s Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum, while the Granary Burial Ground (in Boston, Massachusetts) gravesite of a woman named Goose (nee Foster) has become a pilgrim destination of sorts, promoted in some tourist literature. In fact, no evidence connects this woman to the Mother Goose tradition. Her alleged original book has never been found, and her Colonial American life post-dates the use of the term “Mother Goose,” as well as the earliest versions of many of the rhymes which bear her name.
Back to Robin Hood—King (Prince) John was certainly real.
Speaking of Robin…whether he existed or not, he actually has a grave. (But so does Ebeneezer Scrooge. Ditto for the Cartwrights from Bonanza 
)
Oh! And Casanova was real, too. (Don Juan wasn’t so lucky.)
Speaking of graves, Eleanor Rigby has one in a church yard in Liverpool. The woman has little to do with the song (she died at 44 in 1939 and was married) but Paul liked the name. There’s also a statue of her in Liverpool (based on the song, not the real person).
Speaking of Beatles songs, there was also a real Mr. Kite; the song basically musicalized an 1843 circus poster John Lennon owned.
Except for the minor detail that he wasn’t a Marquis. He was actually a Comte (Count), but for some reason gave himself a promotion.
As I understand, James Bond the ornithologist was a good friend of Ian Fleming’s, and he gave 007 that name as a tribute to him. (Which, of course, makes the irony of 007 using the cover of an ornithologist when infiltrating Cuba, on the birds of which the real Bond was the recognized expert, delicious.)
Semi-Hijack–
Meet the Wold Newton families!
Intriguging notion.
Continuing to speak of Beatles songs, wasn’t Dr. Robert also a real person? Or was the name changed to protect the innocent?
Fleming didn’t know the real James Bond when he gave 007 his name, he just had copy of Bond’s Birds of the West Indies. In fact, they met only once.
When I saw Pierce Brosnan examining a copy of the book in Die Another Die I burst out laughing. I got some strange looks - I think I was the only one in the theater who got the joke.
The final word on Robin Hood’s real life existence:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_143.html
I was reminded recently that the protagonist in the fictional story Island of the Blue Dolphins was actually based on a real person, a woman who was found living alone on the island of San Nicolas off the coast of California years after all the rest of her people had been removed from the island:
Near the Sphinx at Giza, there is a temple which the Egyptians believed contained the tomb of Osiris. I don’t know whether or not archaeologists have found a sarcophagus. If I understand correctly, the temple was close to the Nile, and is now mostly below the water table, so if there was a mummy, it probably decayed long ago.
- or -
I suppose you could look at the Lennon Playboy interview, but he seems to have misremembered or exaggerated quite a lot of verifiable info in that.
Kilroy:
From the link:
James J Kilroy was a ship inspector at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts, USA. It was his responsibility to check on how many holes a riveter had filled in a shift on any given day. In order to prevent double counting by dishonest riveters and to prove to his supervisors that he'd been doing his work, he began marking 'Kilroy was here' inside the hulls of the ships being built. He used yellow crayon so it would be easily visible; this way the off-shift inspectors wouldn't count the rivets more than once and pay the riveter for work he hadn't done.
Mother Goose was covered in anthor post. Sorry I’m so late to reply, just got back from the weekend.
So what I was saying was that they did exist in some form, but that they were not the people that the fictional stories desribe either.
In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams recounts the appalling poetry of both the Vogons (third worst in the universe) and the Azgoths of Kria (second worst in the universe); he then goes on to mention that the most awful poetry in the universe perished along with its creator, Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England, when the Earth was demolished to make way for a new interstellar bypass. This is mildly amusing to most readers.
In the original radio show, however, Adams declared the worst poetry in the universe to be the product of Paul Neil Milne Johnstone - a real poet – and later changed both the name and gender of the author to the imaginary character. Whether this was at the request of Johnstone or Adams’s own publisher is unclear, but Johnstone was certainly a real person.
… and while it refers to a number and not an “imaginary person,” I’ve heard that the numerical odds of being picked up by a passing spacecraft after being ejected from another one before you asphyxiate do, in fact (or at least, did), correspond to the phone number of an Islington flat. In the Hitchhiker’s Guide, this is where Arthur met Trillian and Zaphod (who, at the time, had only the two arms and the one head, and called himself “Phil”), but In Real Life was supposedly the home of some of friends of the author.
Speaking of Douglas Adams, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a real person and, unbelievable as it is, “Xanadu” is a real poem and not a joke invented by Adams.
Cite? :dubious:
:smack: Ya know, when one makes a joke, it helps to get the details right. “Kubla Khan” is the title, not “Xanadu.”
Not to mention all the Alamo-related content. Plaques and everything.
[QUOTE=ascenray]
Speaking of Douglas Adams, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a real person and, unbelievable as it is, “Xanadu” is a real poem and not a joke invented by Adams.
[QUOTE]
Is this a whoosh? :dubious: