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  • (BC) A Perfectly Understandable Error

    From Quadibloc@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jun 18 17:27:00 2023
    I happened to encounter this web page the other day:

    https://www.space.com/tereshkova-sally-ride-skylab-hart-comic-strip

    Although the Apollo-Soyuz missions conclusively demonstrated that
    Lloyd Mallan was wrong, and the Soviet Union actually _had_ sent
    men into space, rather than faking all those missions... given that
    the U.S.S.R. was an evil dictatorship on a par with Nazi Germany,
    it is not at all surprising that its accomplishments in fields such as spaceflight are forgotten, and when we think of manned spaceflight,
    we only think of what NASA had accomplished.

    So, when Johnny Hart's B.C. comic for September 25, 2002 was
    prepared -

    Children in a classroom are asked who was the first woman in
    space,

    one child answers: "Alice Kramden"...

    This is mistaken, so the teacher corrects the child, but then says
    that was a heck of a guess, since familiarity with the show The
    Honeymooners is not expected of young children...

    that the "correct" answer was Sally Ride instead of Valentina
    Tereshkova was an understandable error on the part of the
    cartoonist.

    In fact, I had encountered _another_ instance of this phenomenon
    in a news article I read recently, about Rakesh Sharma, who was
    the first person from India to enter space, having gone up into orbit
    on a Soviet rocket in 1984. When an American astronaut of East
    Indian descent went into orbit with the Space Shuttle, there was
    understandable excitement in India as well, but understandably
    some pointed out that it should be tempered by remembering that
    an actual citizen of India had already been to space.

    John Savard

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Quadibloc@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jun 18 17:38:48 2023
    I have just learned that the first woman to break the sound
    barrier was Jacquelyn Cochran. Now I wonder if she inspired
    the name of Star Trek's Zephrem Cochrane, discoverer of
    the warp drive that enabled faster-than-light travel in that TV
    show.

    I encountered her name in an attempt to search for more
    information about the first Lebanese pilot to break the
    sound barrier. Although his name wasn't mentioned, it
    was noted that he left Lebanon to find a better life for his
    family, after being with an airline that heroically maintained
    civilian air service to Lebanon during difficult times... and
    wound up running a fast-food restaurant in Edmonton.

    Someone - there is a bit of ambiguity in the history, but
    he was no doubt a WASP - founded a fast food chain in
    Alberta that was rather... unoriginal.

    You've heard of Burger King, which was one of the locations
    where Kentucky Fried Chicken was available. Well, this guy
    founded Burger Baron, and offered Texas Fried Chicken
    there.

    The chain encountered difficulties... but instead of vanishing,
    the trademarks ended up in the hands of the operators, and so
    it worked out that many of the locations were operated by
    Lebanese immigrants, who helped other newcomers start up
    new ones. I heard of this when hearing of a documentary someone
    made about this little-known chapter of Alberta history. (The title
    is "The Lebanese Burger Mafia", incidentally, if you're curious.)

    John Savard

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Charles Packer@21:1/5 to Quadibloc on Mon Jun 19 07:28:43 2023
    On Sun, 18 Jun 2023 17:27:00 -0700, Quadibloc wrote:

    In fact, I had encountered _another_ instance of this phenomenon in a
    news article I read recently, about Rakesh Sharma, who was the first
    person from India to enter space, having gone up into orbit on a Soviet rocket in 1984. When an American astronaut of East Indian descent went
    into orbit with the Space Shuttle, there was understandable excitement
    in India as well, but understandably some pointed out that it should be tempered by remembering that an actual citizen of India had already been
    to space.


    Incidentally, there has been a sprinkling of India-flavored news
    in advance of Modi's state visit to the U.S. on June 22.
    Most peculiarly, I have seen prominently headlined pieces about
    India's female wrestlers.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)