Excellent observation. I think the raised elbows have a lot to do with it.
two observations:
- Notice that, for some reason, he didn’t include Paris, TX
- He did not include Springfield
Now for a question - are there more Houstons or Springfields?
There aren’t many towns in Wyoming, so I was ready to call bullshit on Atlantic City (as I had never heard of it), but, it turns out…
I would guess, if it wasn’t just a “there isn’t room for everything” decision. Paris, TX is such a “the other one” that it tends to be referred to as “Paris, TX” all the time.
Is there a THE Springfield?
He also left out Norway, Mexico, Paris, Oxford, all in a relatively small section of Maine.
He’s only including U.S. cities that share a name with a more famous U.S. city. The famous “Paris” is in France.
He’s only including cities where there’s a famous city that everyone thinks of when they hear the name. “Springfield” is famous precisely for being such a ubiquitous name. When you hear “Houston”, 99% of people will immediately think of Houston, TX, not Houston, FL, or any of the other Houstons. Springfield doesn’t have that sort of association.
I’m kinda sad he didn’t include Raleigh, ND. It looks to be about six blocks with a post office and a bar.
Right here in the Bay Area we have a Richmond and a Pittsburgh.
Manhattan, KS is kinda famous as the home of Kansas State University. Aka “The Little Apple”, which i think is pretty funny.
it does when you live in a state with a Springfield. Actually, that would have made a good joke - include ALL of the Springfields.
There’s a more famous US “Lisbon” than the ones in ME and NH?
I was wondering about that too, and found this:
https://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/portam/communities.html
Good point. I missed that initially. He does use a handful of cities where the “famous one” is outside the U.S. (Lisbon, Vienna, North Pole, etc.). So…dunno.
I was also amused by the inclusion of Manhattan, MT. It’s a literal three-street town (and yes, the largest of those three is named Broadway). So far as I can tell, its only reason for existence is as a bedroom community for folks who can’t stand the big-city hustle and bustle of Bozeman (or Belgrade). Oh, and there’s a really great steakhouse there.
So, thinking about it some more, I think notable omissions like Paris, Texas, and Cairo, Illinois were omitted precisely because they are so notable. The fact that there is a Paris, Texas won’t come as a surprise to many XKCD readers, whereas the fact that there is a Houston, Florida will. Or at least I think that’s Randall’s assumption.
So, the same reason he didn’t list all the Springfields. It’s not going to come as a surprise to anyone to learn that there are other Springfields in the U.S. than the one that immediately springs to their mind.
I see only one entry on this map where he added a parentheses, presumably as some sort of explanation. Namely, in New York State, he put “TEXAS (TEXAS, MEXICO)”
What is that about? Is there a town in Mexico named “Texas”?
The Texas in New York state is part of a town called Mexico.
I think they did that on purpose to make us crazy. 
Both probably named during the Mexican-American War. There’s lots of places in the US with such names. For example, there’s a couple of towns named Churubusco, named for a battle in that war.
Slightly surprised that Detroit OR isn’t on the map there.
It even has a wikipedia entry. It doesn’t answer the most pressing question: why call a town Atlantic City when it is 2700 km from the Atlantic shore, and more than 2000 m above sea level. Also “City”? There are 39 Atlantic Cityzens.
Who makes these wikipedia entries about microscopic towns, anyway? On the History page most of the editors are named Bot, so I guess they are auto-generated.
Pretty much all US town wikipages have a standard block of text with demographic data from the 2000 Census. Virtually certain to have been generated by a program based on a Census database. I suspect that most, if not all, the pages themselves were generated at the same time by the same program. So if a town, no matter how small, was in that database, it has a Wikipage.
Obviously, it was settled by someone who liked the original Atlantic City, and found it amusing to name the new place after it. And when you only have 39 citizens, it’s not hard to convince enough of them to go along with the joke.