What's in a name?

I read with amusement the story today that a Canadian government minister had informed a friend by Blackberry of the death of his cat, which he had called ‘Thatcher’ in honour of the great lady, and that the message ‘Thatcher has died’ had been broadcast widely causing grief among Canadian conservatives, with telephone calls to a bemused 10 Downing St and Buckingham Palace.

In the 1980s city dealing rooms it was common for the office junior to be seated in front of the sole Reuters screen shouting out any significant news. In a Japanese bank an unfortunate intern shouted that the skiffle singer Lonnie Donegan had had a heart attack. Because of the lad’s unfortunate pronunciation the dealers thought he meant Ronnie Reagan and started selling the bottom out of the dollar until calls to the Japanese embassy in Washington, then in the middle of the night, revealed the truth.

Both were false alarms. The skiffle king died a couple of years before his ‘namesake’, in 2002.