Plus One: Boring, Gas and Ding Dong

The Sign Says It All

Every once in a while, especially on a Friday, I'll use a little Google-fu and come up with some of the funnier and most unusual names of towns across America, like here and here. According to the feedback I've gotten on these posts, you guys seem to get a kick out of them. It's been several weeks since I've done a funny town names post, so I figured it must be time to do another one.

I write about this topic about every six weeks or so as a way to take a little break from the seriousness of everyday life. Believe it or not, there's a guy who's a photographer for a New York magazine who actually traveled around the country to the tune of 38,000 miles and 40 states and found a bunch of towns with odd names. Needless to say, the dude wrote a book about his travels and it's called, "Passing Gas: And Other Towns Along the American Highway. The "gas" in the book's title refers to Gas, Kansas. I found an excerpt from the book and thought you might get a chuckle out of it. I'll cite a couple of towns here, then to read more about Gas, Kansas and other oddly-named towns.

Here are a couple of my favorites:

• " The people of Ding Dong, Texas, don't know how they became Ding Dongs. And
  they're not the only ones."
• "And some towns can't live up to their reputation. A resident of Nice,
  Calif., was accused of being particularly nasty. Jay Leno once held up a
  headline:
  Nice Man Arrested for Beating Wife".

It's an easy read, so if you've got a few minutes to burn (it is Friday and this is as good a time killer as anything),
click here to get a load of some of the places this guy came across. It's worth the time.