Balbo was a cardinal from Genoa, Italy, that was in attendance at the election of Pope Sporus VI, and who kept spilling his ink during balloting (Saint Fidgeta and Other Parodies, 53).
Inspiration[]
Balbo is both the Italian word for stammering[1], which seems the sort of thing this cardinal might have excelled at, and the common term in the late 1930s and early 1940s to describe any large formation of aircraft, named after the Italian flying ace Italo Balbo[2].