Dateline envy

I'm in South Africa this week where we've been playing Fun With Vowels. I could spend entire days here just reading road signs aloud, it's that much fun. Potchefstroom, Swartruggens, Boekenhoutkloof, Hornsoord, Magaliesmoot, Phokeng, the list goes on. (There's also the occasional street named after a former apartheid leader, which is less humorous.) Getting directions over the phone can take up most of the afternoon, but South Africans are really patient with this.

The good news is, the crazy names mean I have a good chance for a killer dateline while I'm here. Journalists have an informal competition with one another over datelines -- the location that precedes the first sentence of a news story, telling where the story was reported from. These range from the hard-core (FALLUJAH, Iraq; PYONGYANG, North Korea, etc.) to the hilarious (BLACK TICKLE, Newfoundland), and the best ones give you a good anecdote for a lifetime's worth of journalist cocktail parties. A photographer I'm working with says he filed pictures once from PIG'S PENIS, South Africa, but the best I've ever seen was in the New York Times last year -- LAKE CHARGOGGAGOGGMANCHAUGGAGOGGCHAUBUNAGUNGAMAUGG, Mass., the longest place name in the U.S.