Ever Wonder Where Starbucks Got Their Name?

I'm an admitted and proudly-proclaimed Battlestar Galactica fan - never saw the old series but Ron Moore's steering of the new series airing on SciFi has been intense with numerous unexpected turns. It's the mini-series that could, and it's on trajectory for a third season collisional ending.

But the show is not what I'm here talking for.

I'm driving the long hour of 4 AM home from Richmond, window down, radio blaring, and desperate to keep my eyelids raised long enough so that I manage stay within the painted lines of the road. I get to thinking about coffee. I'm not a coffee person but at that moment I would have taken the caffeine juice intravenously.

With the way my mind works, I naturally jump from thinking about that to a cartoon drawing of a paraplegic mummy on an IV drip, to Grey's Anatomy, to Battlestar. And it was then that I realized the unmistakable name similarity between Katee Sackhoff's "Starbuck" character and the Seattle coffee brand Starbucks.

So, which came first? The coffee or the fictional hotshot pilot? The original show aired in 1978, nearly 30 years ago. One must think Starbuck was on the block first then. Wrong.

Starbucks coffee opened in '71, beating the show by 7 years. So does that reverse the tables on which is the chicken and which is the egg? Not exactly.

Turns out I'm not the only one with such useless questions and that someone has done their research ("Not I, said the cat"). Go read the answer here. I'll wait.

You back, already? Interested that it was another, older obscure character that has more to do with the coffee brand's namesake. We can thank Melvin for that.