Rogers St.
by Jeff
Image text: 'We can also use middle names in place of first pet's names, but yours is something incomprehensible about dropping tables.'
This comic is a reference to the game of creating your porn star name by putting your pet's name as your first name and the street you grew up on as your last name. For example: Max (Dog's name) Pine (Street name). In this comic, Randall would have named his cat "Mister" and had moved to "Rogers" Street and so his daughter's porn name would be "Mister Rogers", which is pretty high on the very unsexy name scale (if there was one) especially for a female actor.
In this way, Randall has prevented his daughter from getting into porn.
In the image text, he references the other way of creating a porn star name with your middle name and as your first name and the street still as your last name. Additionally, the image text references comic 327 in which "Exploits of a Mom" puts SQL table instructions into their name so that it will mess with SQL tables at school. In 327, the kids name contains '); DROP TABLE Students;-- and we are lead to believe the person in the comic above contains a similar command.
Here's a link to the location of Rogers Street, which is near Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA.
April 11th, 2011
Not only is “Mister Rogers” a very unsexy name, but Mister Rogers was a real person who apparently hadn’t got any bad sides:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Rogers%27_Neighborhood
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Rogers
Mister Rogers has already been referenced in http://xkcd.com/767/
But hey, Jeff, your explanation was excellent this time. I did not understand the comic at all (because in Germany there is no “create your porn star name” game, at least none I had heard of).
April 11th, 2011
It’s the first XKCD comic ever that I completely didn’t understand until coming here.
April 12th, 2011
Likewise. I had no idea this site existed. All is now crystal clear.
April 11th, 2011
Some of my coworkers were talking about this naming convention just last Friday…very timely!
April 11th, 2011
You people are missing a reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Rogers%27_Neighborhood
Definitely a mood killer…..
April 11th, 2011
I thought it would be obvious WHY “Mister Rogers” is very high on the unsexy names scale, but I suppose there could be people out there who are unfamiliar with Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
April 11th, 2011
Anyone not from America, for example.
April 11th, 2011
Excellent point, I had forgotten about the fact that Mister Rogers is not common knowledge for the whole world…
April 11th, 2011
There don’t seem to be any residences on Rogers Street, though.
April 11th, 2011
There are some apartments you can access via rogers, but those tend to have addresses on Binney
April 11th, 2011
I’m just pumped that there’s a Boston (okay, Cambridge) reference finally!
April 11th, 2011
WOW I knew it was simply too unfunny for me to understand.
I was looking at the other xkcdexplained site… LOL is all I can say
April 11th, 2011
First time I am totally, completely blank on an xkcd comic. Had to google, yikes! Thanks guys!
April 11th, 2011
I usually get XKCD pretty quickly, but couldn’t make anything of this one. I had to google Roger’s street and found this website. Excellent website.
April 11th, 2011
Neat explanation, thanks!
I didn’t know about Mr Rogers OR the convention about porn star names (but I kind of assumed it was something like that with the alt text!)
But please, this is a comic, you cannot say Randall Munroe is talking, it’s just some kind of narrator! (who can – or cannot – happen to think the same as Munroe!)
April 11th, 2011
Rivercourt is a residence located on Rogers St in Cambridge (units for sale on redfin). So it is possible to pull this off.
April 12th, 2011
I like the research. Nice work.
April 11th, 2011
just a small correction: xkcd says “kid”, not “daugther”, so it seems it’s refering to both male or female children..
April 12th, 2011
I suppose that, for this XKCD to work for UK readers, you would need to change the names to Valerie Singleton or John Noakes. Or perhaps the aged gardening expert Percy Thrower. But the pet/street convention also seems to be only a US thing…
Have any other nationalities got some suggestions?
April 12th, 2011
This is one of the few xkcds that I’ve had to look up. I had absolutely no idea what the deal was. Thanks for the explanation.
April 13th, 2011
I’m pretty amazed by how many people had to look this one up. Are they all from outside of the U.S. or just deprived of public broadcasting as children?
April 13th, 2011
The thing people don’t get isn’t Mister Rogers. Everyone knows who Mister Rogers is. They haven’t heard of the pornstar name game, and don’t understand how some vague combination of the words Mister and Rogers in your childhood would affect whether or not you end up in porn.
April 14th, 2011
Not being from the USA I didn’t get this reference, although I know the porn star naming game; thank you for the explanation!
Seriously some of the people commenting here really don’t seem to recognise that there is a LOT of people and places that are outside USA (including most of America!).
April 15th, 2011
I knew about the porn star naming thing but not who Mister Rogers is.
April 15th, 2011
Welcome to all the UK* fans of xkcd!
*wanted to say ‘foreign’ or ‘non-US’ fans but thought it impolite.
April 16th, 2011
This is probably the first xkcd where I got all the jokes without help. I was here at about 7:00am, but this site still hadn’t updated.
Anyone else think the hair looks a lot like Ron Jeremy’s?
April 25th, 2011
1 Rogers St., Cambridge, MA is one of the campuses of the IBM Research Center, so apparently Watson already lives there! That is the only reason I can imagine why Randall Munroe would include Cambridge in the comic.
http://www.watson.ibm.com/general_info_cam.shtml
July 21st, 2011
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