FAITP's Annual Roundup of the Most Interesting Towns in the USA

Klezmer, Arkansas. The municipality’s having become the first in the country to make divorce a capital crime, Mayor Vicki Gomez explains, stems from the city council’s realization that “forbidding perverts of the same sex to wed goes only so far toward protecting the sacred institution of marriage.” Unhappy couples have been slipping out of town by the hundreds since the November 2009 execution of Jack and Mysti Ryan, who had filed for annulment of their marriage on the grounds of their mutual realization “that they were two very different people,” according to court documents.

Oral, Nevada. This town was formed by a group of former employees of legal brothels whose whores-don’t-kiss rule they decided they could no longer obey. The town comprises a post office, a nail salon, a convenience store, a McDonald’s, a Wendy’s, a Taco Bell, a Burger King, a Subway, and a Frederick’s of Hollywood that’s open only Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons. For $20 an hour, lonely men and lesbians can hire a “girl” to go “neck” with them in a secluded spot in the desert in the back seat of a large American sedan with vinyl upholstery. For an additional $10 per hour, they’ll let patrons remove their brassieres and put their hands under their skirts, but genital contact (“heavy petting”) is strictly forbidden. “We’re all about helping our older customer return to a time before universally accessible pornography,” explains Trixxxi Taylor.

Anesthesia, New Hampshire. Some 82 percent of the town’s residents are employed by providers of hospice care. Things get pretty crazy on weekend nights when workers suffering compassion fatigue get drunk in one of the town’s two bars, and then try to disfigure one another. The town boasts a 100 percent employment rate for specialists in reconstructive plastic surgery.

Ground Zero, Utah.This newly incorporated (as of July 2010) town, which has the highest concentration of mosques in North America, was funded by a consortium of Arab oil trillionaires who presumably wanted to irritate right wing demagogues. It is listed as the only North American stop on the former Cat Stevens' 2011 world tour.

Pine Ridge, South Dakota.The town can attribute its being the fastest growing in North America to the Supreme Court’s July 2009 ruling that, as a sovereign nation, the Ogala Sioux have the right to cultivate Papaver somniferum (better known as opium). The town has recently become as popular with foodies as with international drug cartels as a result of a May 2010 article in Ostentatious Consumption magazine about Oyúȟpe Thiyóšpaye, whose range of dishes involving prairie dog the magazine’s correspondent described as "breathtaking."

Binge, Arizona. Twenty miles north of the Mexican border, this town boasts the country’s highest SAT scores — in significant part, Superintendent of Education Rex Rymond speculates, because students are told as they enter the testing area that they can either score over 1200 or be driven across the border and left there without access to their birth certificates. It's Norwegian sister city, Purge, can boast of no comparable academic success.

Prejudice, Idaho. Formerly a bastion of white supremacism, the town, which once banned the use of the exclamation yo and baggy clothing, now boasts the country’s highest percentage of residents in the federal witness protection program, which might explain why, since it was featured on the National Geographic channel in August 2008, it has also had the highest homicide rate west of the Mississippi. A move to rename the town Payback, spearheaded by the town’s wag, was narrowly rejected by voters in November 2009.