ONTARIO COMMUNITIES THAT CHANGED THEIR NAMES

1. A lot of people claim that George Lucas ripped them off for Star Wars. For example, Darth Vader looks a lot like a Marvel comics supervillain named Doctor Doom, who started battling the Fantastic Four in the 1960s. The Jedi, meanwhile, are a lot like the Bene Gesserit from Dune. Both are elite orders that can control minds. While Luke uses the Force to wield a lightsabre, Paul’s mystical weapon is the Crysknife.

2. Rather ominously, singer Perry Como and NFL quarterback Len Dawson were seventh sons of a seventh son. In folklore, such people are supposed to have supernatural powers, sometimes said to have been granted by Satan. The idea comes up frequently in pop culture, notably in Bob Dylan’s song Highway 61 Revisited and in Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker novels, about a title character who can create and shape things around him.

3. Countries have their own Internet domain names. Canada is .ca, and the U.S. is .us, not that it gets used much. The domain name for South Africa is .za, which seems odd, except the country’s name in Dutch is Zuid- Afrika, and Dutch was an official language until 1925. In Afrikaans, the country is Suid-Afrika. The .sa domain, by the way, is used by Saudi Arabia. None of the African names for the country work out to .za either.

4. Ontario communities have some pretty terrible names. Under enormous pressure, Berlin, Ont., became Kitchener during the First World War, renamed for a British military hero. Nazi sympathizer Unity Mitford was conceived in a mining town called Swastika, which is still called that. And in 1986, Stalin, Ont., was renamed for wheelchair athlete Rick Hansen. And yes, it was indeed named for the Soviet dictator.