For reasons not worth going into, I was looking up city nicknames today and came across some rather bizarre ones. The best ones are mostly in the midwest. Some of my favorites:
- The Birmingham of America: Pittsburgh, PA – Shouldn’t this honor go to, oh, I don’t know… Birmingham?
- Hog Butcher for the World: Chicago, IL – Yeah, ’cause that’s what I think of when I think of Chicago.
- The Icebox of the United States: International Falls, MN – Ironically, I’ve only been there in the summer when it wasn’t all that cold. But Frostbite Falls of Rocky and Bullwinkle fame was modeled after International Falls.
- Mistake on the Lake: Cleveland, OH – It even rhymes. How cute.
- Band Instrument Capital of the World: Elkhart, IN – I guess someone has to take that title.
- The Catfish Capital of Iowa: Linn Grove, IA – Belzoni, MS already took the title for Catfish Capital of the World, so poor Linn Grove had to settle for whatever it could get.
- The City That Refused To Die: Sanford, ME – Hey, Dustin, aren’t you from there?
- Cow Chip Capital: Beaver, OK – What kind of city would proudly nickname itself after dried shit?
- Goat Ropin’ Capital of the World: Gotebo, OK – The next time I want to rope me some goats, I know where to go.
- Home of the World’s Largest Cheeto: Algona, IA – It looks like a cancerous growth.
Colossus of Rhode 
gotebo is pronounced GO-dee-bo, in case you were wondering.
You know, since it’s the Goat Ropin’ Capital of the World, I assumed it was pronounced GOAT-bo.
Just shows what I know.
it’s ok, i forgive you. half the towns in oklahoma have weird pronunciations anyway… like “miami.” you’d think it’d be pronounced like miami fl, right? nope. “my amm uhh.” i don’t get it either.
Golly! but I am laughing aloud!
And then again…Are we not proud of the giant humanity of those folks out in Beaver, OK! who understand how their forebears lived, stayed alive, and the native Indians before them; and who, like me, remember those “field games” with their cousins when, turning to throw a likely gob, they got caught square in the mouth with a yet more ripe item; but everyone left the field laugh’n, and … going in to dinner.
Last week at work, for reasons I won’t go into, I stumbled across an article on Beaver, OK. Not only is it a city nickname, it’s also a rather extensive festival surrounding the tossing of said cow chips. The preferred method of throwing these chips is underhand, like slow-pitch softball. The record has been standing for several years.
The stranger thing is, when I tried to email the text of this rather entertaining article to a friend, my work email account refused to send it, stating that it had triggered the adult dictionary. The dirtiest word in there was “dung.” Which is quite dirty, I admit, but in a very different sense of the word. *shrug*