But, fear not, I’m back, and so are the names. It’s a good, and particularly weird, crop this week, so let’s get right to them. There were two contenders for the best pop culture name of the week.
Mr. Papagiorgio, a reference (I’m assuming) to the fake ID that Rusty Griswold uses in 1997’s “Vegas Vacation,” is a bit of an obscure reference even for my taste. So, we go with Howard Wolowitz, named for the engineer-turned-astronaut portrayed by Simon Helberg for more than a decade on “The Big Bang Theory.
” “Big Bang” was one of the most popular shows on TV for a seeming eternity, but I’ll admit that I never actually watched the show until it became a staple for endless (and I do mean endless) reruns on TBS. I’m a Space Race nerd. I’ve watched the Tom Hanks-produced “From the Earth to the Moon” miniseries on multiple occasions, and I’m a huge fan of the Apple TV alternate history series “For All Mankind,” the main characters of which are very loosely based on Apollo 10 commander and lunar module pilot Thomas Stafford and Eugene Cernan Apollo 10 was the final test run for the Apollo 11 moon landing, which happened a couple months later.
Stafford and Cernan flew the lunar module around the moon, photographing the planned Apollo 11 landing site in the Sea of Tranquility, though they never touched down on the lunar surface. Delightfully, Apollo 10’s call-signs for its command and lunar modules were, respectively, Charlie Brown and Snoopy. NASA .