Tangents

I confess that some lines of inquiry wander well away from their starting-points and maybe could be developed further on other blogs. Thus, because Poul Anderson twice refers to Will Rogers, I googled both Will Rogers and Roy Rogers and discovered a maze of Wikipedia articles linking many multi-media Western series stretching back for decades.

This happened again because Anderson's Trygve Yamamura novels are set in San Francisco. Remembering a 1950s TV series called "The Cisco Kid," I wondered whether "Cisco" was an abbreviation for "San Francisco," just as there was both a Wyoming Kid and a Durango Kid. It turns out that 'Cisco just abbreviates the name, "Francisco." However, here is yet another multi-media character, this one originating in a short story by O. Henry. Both the Kid and his later side-kick, Pancho, were possibly named after Francisco "Pancho" Villa to whom we referred obliquely here.

Everything connects and we now live in a science fictional future where we can access all human knowledge by pressing a button.