Tall Texas Tale?

I pride myself in knowing more than average about U.S. geography. I might forget the odd city of 20,000 here or there, but I know the major cities. So imagine my surprise when I was looking up something on city-data.com, and found the closest city with a population of more than 1,000,000 was Northeast, TX.

That seemed hard to believe. That population would make Northeast the 7th largest city in the country. It would be the second largest city in Texas--behind Houston alone--and the largest city in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. (Or should that be the Northeast-Dallas-Ft. Worth area?) However, it's not so incredible that I could dismiss it out of hand. After all, the third largest city in the country once disappeared--when Brooklyn, NY, was consolidated with New York City. If several suburbs and unincorporated areas consolidated, it's not impossible that they could become larger than the parent city. (It wasn't consolidation so much as growth in that area; but I'd note that San Jose is now larger than San Francisco.)

However, I am more inclined to believe that the truth is that I found glaring a mistake. Infoplease doesn't list Northeast in their list of 50 largest U.S. cities, though they do note a consolidation involving Louisville, KY. It's always possible that there was a consolidation after 2005, but it seems less likely. Also, Wikipedia seems to know nothing about this: their article "Northeast Texas" is about northeastern Texas--that is, the northeast corner of the state not the city. Their page on "Northeast" doesn't mention the town, either. Further, their article on the "Dallas/Ft.Worth Metroplex" doesn't even list Northeast among area cities--even those under 10,000!

One wonders how something like this could have slipped through. Did they slip it in to combat plagiarism? Did a city booster change the population to get attention? Could it be a typo? If it's a deliberate hoax, I'd think Wikipedia would be the first page to alter. I'm left to ponder.

TRIV - Ghana clothes shopping

This week's Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria (or last week's--I think Link TV gets it a week late from PBS, but our local PBS station doesn't show it at all, so I'm not sure; but that's beside the point) had a segment on Ghana's take on "casual Friday"--namely, the county is trying to encourage people to wear domestically made clothes instead of second-hand imports from Europe and the U.S. The second-hand clothes market is called "Kantamanto." What amused me mildly was the translation--according to the report, it roughly means as "a white man has died."

(I should note--I'm not 100% sure whether this term refers to the practice, or a specific store--a search on the Internet turned up a Christian Science Monitor story that confirmed the basic facts and implied the former. However, it said that "abruni waawu" is "a white man has died." I'm guessing that "abruni waawu" and "kantomanto" have the same meaning in different languages--the news accounts didn't make that completely clear, but end up with the same translation.)