Month: February 2013
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Starting from Zero
I used the Zero Milestone marker in Washington, DC as the center of my circle a few weeks ago in Odds and Ends 6. It occurred to me that maybe I’d not talked about this marker before. That seemed odd in itself. That’s because I include it on all of my DC tours for friends…
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Name That Smell
Smells have a way of sticking with people. Everyone knows when they drive past a petrochemical factory, a paper mill, a landfill or a sewage treatment plant. The geographic location becomes lodged in one’s mind with a full set of highly-charged negative associations. I’m going to toss all of those aside. Instead I’m flipping the…
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Search for Search and Other Tales
Longtime readers may recall my fascination with people who come to Twelve Mile Circle, click on the search box on the upper-right corner of the page and then search the word “search.” I don’t pretend to understand the logic although I’ve come to accept it. There is an odd chink in the human psyche that…
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Pick a Lane. Any Lane
Roads. I’ve been thinking about roads a lot lately. I’m not sure how that morphed into a search for the road with the most lanes, but that’s where it ended this evening. San Diego, California, USA Lots of other people have wondered the same thing. That allowed me to cherry-pick various lists and collections for…
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The Other White House
It was Presidents Day in the United States yesterday, a fact likely known by much of the 12MC audience although perhaps not by many people outside the nation. So I posted an image and a brief message on my Findery page. [UPDATE: Unfortunately the site appears to be defunct now] I wasn’t feeling very wordy,…
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NOT as the Crow Flies
All due credit for the article today goes to a reader using the pseudonym “Wangi.” He sent me an email message offline noting an interesting situation, which by implication suggested the basis for another contest. I even stole the title of the current article from him. Thank you, Wangi! There’s nothing unusual going on here,…
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Checkerboarding
Checkerboarding has nothing to do with the game of checkers other than bearing a striking resemblance to its playing surface. Nor is it some awful new interrogation technique invented to pry information from suspects under duress. It is this. I discovered the anomaly on Google Maps in Oregon awhile ago while discussing Latitude Longitude Sequences…
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Truckin’ Through California
This has absolutely nothing to do with the Grateful Dead although they were indeed from California and noted for Truckin’. It is literally about trucks in California. However, feel free to listen to Truckin’ in the background if that would make you happy. So, it all started out more grandiosely. I recalled a particularly awful…
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Just Keep Turning
I think it’s time for another participatory article. The 12MC audience seems to its like little puzzles and challenges. I had to drive to a local shopping center a couple of miles from my home yesterday afternoon to pick up my wife. An Interstate Highway stood between the two locations, acting as a natural barrier,…
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An Obscure Gettysburg
This is the story of John Kennedy. No, not that John Kennedy! I’m referring to John Wright Kennedy who I guarantee that you know nothing about, nor should you. It’s about how a formative event in his life resulting in the naming of a town twenty years later. He was a farmer who underwent a…