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

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

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.