I just had a revelation about Gilligan's Island . Regular fans will remember that Gilligan would from time to time mention his favorite rock group The Mosquitoes. Eventually, the group itself visited the island, looking for a relaxing getaway after a difficult tour. Like all guest stars, the band left in a manner that didn't help the core seven castaways at all. Anyway, it is obvious that the group was conceived as a Beatles parody. The insectile name, to start with, The fact that the group appears to have had a single with the lyrics "don't go in there, yeah yeah yeah." It was not subtle parody. But what only recently occurred to me was the clever way that the names of the members of the fictional group mirror the real-world names of the Fab Four. The Mosquitoes had four members (of course): Bingo, Bango, Bongo, and Irving. Note that three of those names would be quite unusual for any of the men one meets on the street in any city in the Anglophonic world. ...
An odd philosophical troika of philosophers in early modern Britain comes to mind today for no good reason. Locke, Berkeley, Hume. I saw a random post in Quora asking for a brief summary of the significant contributions of each "the" three major philosophers. No more specific context. I have no idea how one would pick THE troika the querent had in mind, But this is one troika if great significance. To summarize their “significant contributions” is a considerable task — or three different tasks, EACH considerable. But it does seem that together the three of them tell a tragic story. In essence we can say this (ignoring the politics of Locke or of Hume, and the vision theory of Berkeley): Locke: Accepted a dualist picture of the world in which minds, conceived of as properties of souls, are intangible beings that must come to grips with a material world around them. His contribution was to think through this material world in Newtonian terms — what he called...