My parents ran a business named my last name and owned the respective reyalilastname.com domain. In the late 90s, my dad had a page on his site with widgets of the top 6 or so search engines. It was a great place to easily jump between Yahoo, AltaVista, Ask Jeeves, etc.
I was in the computer lab with my 6th-grade class kicking off some research project and recommended this page to my teacher who suggested it to all the students. That’s when I learned some classmates didn’t know how to spell my last name, and that removing 1 letter from my last name went to a porn site.
My name is nowhere near anything profane. It would be like McKenzie > McKenie or Saunders > Sanders. Literally nothing that would make you think ‘porn.’
The teachers didn’t notice, but several classmates asked me wtf my parents did. I was an awkward, nerdy kid who hadn’t accepted yet that I would never be popular and I believed providing a really good tool like that would help me achieve the popularity I craved (yeah, helping people do better on their class assignments was what I thought would make me cool—no wonder I wasn’t popular!). I remember feeling that hope just draining from my body as the misspelled page started popping up all over the computer lab.
“First in Flight” was the original (because the Wright brothers’ first flight was in NC), then they added “First in Freedom”. It’s because NC was the first state to write/sign a Declaration of Independence from England, over a year before the Declaration of Independence.
But it was a fucking slave state. I’ve always thought the “First in Freedom” license plate was insulting.
Also, Mark Robinson is insane and a horrible person. Obviously.