Henry is seen reading a comic strip called "Opus the Peahen" drawn by Berkeley Breathed. Breathed is a real, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, whose real strips featuring the character Opus the Penguin ran (under several different titles) from the early 1980s until 2008. The presence of this strip in the Alternate Universe highlights several differences between "our" world and theirs: in ours, the Opus character is a male penguin, while in theirs, she is a female peahen; in ours, Breathed no longer draws a comic strip, while in theirs, he apparently still does. The "peahen" strip was drawn especially for the show by Breathed himself.
As we see on Henry's cab rooftop ad, The West Wing had at least 12 seasons in the alternate universe. It had 7 in ours.
Another example of the differences in the alternate universe: Charlie makes a comment to Lincoln about talking to Travis Bickle, and goes on to explain it's from the Francis Ford Coppala movie Taxi Driver. In our universe Martin Scorsese directed Taxi Driver.
Continuing with the gradual revelation of differences between "our" universe versus the alternate universe: the alternate universe's USA appears to have adopted the metric system (Lincoln reports on Fauxlivia's travel speed in kilometers per hour instead of miles per hour). In the real world, there was a campaign for the US to adopt the metric system, but the general public had little enthusiasm for the idea and (except for some liquid measurement conversions) it mostly petered out during the early 1980s.
When Olivia's mother drops her off at her apartment, a double-decker car, which was only previously shown in a blue miniature version by Walter to explain displacement in the two universes, drives past.