"Mr. Sunshine" is a new one on me... but I'll quickly divert the topic to the broader furrow of racial slurs in general. I was listening to an uncharacteristically socially-aware morning radio show just a couple of days ago, and they went into great detail soliciting explanations of various ethnic put-downs... "Kike" being a derivation of the German "kiko", meaning circle, being that Christian immigrants to Ellis Island were marked with crosses, and Jews were marked with circles. The one I knew was "gook", and my experience as a tall, pale redhead in South Korea elucidated the derivation of that one... The Korean word for "American" (That's "US'n" on this board) is "mee-gook". I understood instantly that the epithet had to have originated during the Korean War - when an insular, homogenous society is suddenly exposed to a new culture, there's a lot of pointing and staring (which still predominates in Korea today). I can't even tell you how many times I walked down the street and was pointed out as a "mee-gook" ~ clearly the troops stationed in Korea chose to interpret "Me Gook", and thus a slur is born. One of the points made by the Jewish host of the radio show was that understanding the origins of intended insults pulls the power right out from under the insulters. I'll be watching this thread to see if anything materializes about Mr. Sunshine...

Thanks for the evocative post, and welcome aBoard, Dotman!