I like it when cities name themselves after something they feel is worthy or appropriate about the city itself.
For instance, I find it interesting that Long Beach chose to name themselves after what it considered (way back when) to be its most dominant feature: literally a very long beach. Made total sense, and prevented a future disaster like calling themselves Wow Look At All The Giant Container Ships Lined Up At The Port.
Up in the Bay Area – again, an appropriate name for an area surrounding the San Francisco Bay – there is a plethora of cities that are named after what at one time was their most appealing feature.
Redwood City, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale all are beautiful names based on beautiful features that distinguished each beautiful city from each other beautifully.
That is until the Tech Industry annexed the Bay Area, renamed it Silicon Valley, and robbed the sun and the beautiful mountain views from the locals by building gigantic “campuses” that use redwood as a decorative graphic design element in their Family Restrooms.
Bitter? Oh, a tad.
So, as the unofficial expert on All Things Southern California, I think the cities of the SoCal area should follow the lead of Long Beach and choose new names after their own unique characteristics.
I would volunteer the following cities for a name upgrade:
- Santa Monica becomes: Damn, It Took 20 Minutes To Drive 2 Blocks-ica.
- Pasadena: Did We Mention We Have The Rose Bowl-adena?
- Los Angeles: Man Does This Skyline Look Really Good At Night-eles
- Westchester: No Really, You Get Used To The Planes Taking Off At LAX-chester
- Simi Valley: Holy Crap It’s A Long Way Out Here Valley
- Anaheim: Hey You Guys, There Really Is More To Us Than Disneyland – Aw, Never Mind-aheim
Besides, it would be really fun to listen to my GPS say the names.
This post originally appeared on HumorOutcasts.com
Forrest Brakeman 
Here in the great gray north of New Jersey, I feel like they’ve often just given up when it comes to city names. There is a good amount of ocean, here, but there just is no excuse — save for the wild lack of imagination — for having three towns named “Seaside”, “Seaside Heights” and “Seaside Park” within biking distance of each other. Or “Ocean City”, “Ocean Township”, and “Township of Ocean” — which are, strangely, not located in “Ocean County”.
That’s gotta be confusing for the relatives when they come to visit. Out here in SoCal, we confuse people with our Valleys. Simi Valley, San Fernando Valley, San Gabriel Valley, Fountain Valley, Crescenta Valley – it just goes on and on. There’s really only two. They should just call the whole place Really Hot Valley.