Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Month: December 2011

  • Reflecting on 2011

    I’m progressing better than I expected with my off-season website maintenance plan. It has provided an unexpected opportunity to hammer-out one final post in 2011. I’ve decided to use the downtime to reflect on accomplishments on Twelve Mile Circle during the last year. I posted 156 articles over the year — generally three per week…

  • Full Grassley

    So I realize it’s only Day 1 of my off-season hiatus. Nonetheless, I’ll poke my head up briefly before hibernating again. I want to make sure 12MC readers saw a recent comment posted by John Deeth of Iowa. Comments often fall through the cracks because they don’t appear in newsreaders. And doubly so at this…

  • Off Season

    I read an interesting article the other day about Chincoteague, a tiny town on Virginia’s eastern shore (map). It’s a place probably best known for its annual wild pony roundup. The ponies live on Assateague Island just a short distance away. So each year a local volunteer fire department and it’s “saltwater cowboys” swim the…

  • Not Quite Obscure Enough

    There are places so obscure that they achieve a level of notoriety in geo-oddity circles. Examples would include Loving County, Texas and Kalawao County, Hawaii, which are both revered in the county counting community. No county has fewer residents than Loving with only 82 people recorded in the 2010 Decennial Census. Kalawao comes in a…

  • Numerical Place Names

    I wondered if I could find any place names composed entirely of numbers. Thus, while communities such as Thousand Oaks and Twentynine Palms in California were interesting in a sense, they wouldn’t do for my purpose. I wanted to find places that transcended the precision of a description to reach entirely higher circles of absurdity.…

  • Vennbahn

    Google Street View finally arrived in Belgium. This offered an opportunity to revisit a topic that’s been sitting in my queue unaddressed for the longest time. I figured that most of us were familiar with the Belgian portion of the Vennbahn railroad line. This is the line that created several small German enclaves within Belgium…

  • Google Maps County Lines Imminent?

    At long last, I think we are getting very close to seeing county lines on Google Maps. I noticed them earlier today but they’ve since disappeared. I also observed numerous town boundaries, and in a couple of instances, even neighborhood boundaries. I believe the folks at Google are experimenting with various displays: some of what…

  • Time Zone Limits, Part 2

    I went through a bit of an exercise to uncover the extreme eastern and western longitudes for each of the time zones in the Lower-48 United States, in Part 1. These points looked rather striking when I placed them in a map. Now, let’s look a little closer at the eight points individually. I consider…

  • Time Zone Limits, Part 1

    I’ve noted my appreciation for random visitors on many occasions. They serve as an amazing source of accidental topics. This time an anonymous lurker wished to find the easternmost extreme of the U.S. Central Time Zone. Why stop there, I figured? What are the extreme longitudes for each of the time zones in the Lower-48…

  • Disestablished National Parks

    Last summer 12MC reader “Scott” provided me with a boatload of National Park trivia. I continue to mine that for article suggestions. With that, I’m going pursue an angle that might be little known, or maybe just to me. One often thinks of everything associated with National Parks as perpetual. After all, their goals include…