A common theme with country code tld's is that you get one country using someone else tld if and when there is a match in the local language and the two letters. For example, Sweden has a lot of swedish websites under the .nu (island state of Niue), to the point where the Swedish registrar actually bought and took over the operation of the tld. "nu" is the word for "now" in swedish.

For me who don't live in the states and have very little exposure of that satirical newspaper, .onion brings no connection to it. If I did not know about The Tor Project I would had guess it was a cooking related domain name. I would also have guessed that google was a company trying to sell glasses.