California

The Pacific's cold counterpart is named for the coast it follows.

The current runs south past California and keeps its coastal waters cold and its summers foggy.

A California king is narrower than an ordinary king, not bigger.

The size is generally traced to Los Angeles mattress makers in the 1960s, who built extra-long beds for large houses and let the trade name follow. No single inventor is documented, and the dimensions were only pinned down later by the industry.

A roll named for California may well have been invented in Canada.

Chefs in the Little Tokyo district of Los Angeles and Hidekazu Tojo in Vancouver have both been credited, and the rice-outside construction was reportedly meant to hide the seaweed from wary diners. The roll later traveled to Japan as an American curiosity rather than the other way around.

A magazine editorial mocked the name within months, and the discoverers had a ready answer.

Thompson, Street, Ghiorso and Seaborg made californium in February 1950 by bombarding curium with alpha particles. The New Yorker suggested the Berkeley group should have called elements 97 and 98 universitium and ofium, so that the sequence spelled out university of california. Seaborg replied that they had considered it and declined, in case chemists in New York later found two elements and named them newium and yorkium.