Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Month: April 2013

  • Latitudinal Border Station Extremes

    So I’m not sure the title adequately conveyed what I’m trying to describe. Unfortunately, I can’t think of a better concise title to replace it either. Conceptually, I wanted to know the northernmost and southernmost places in the world and in the United States where one could cross an international border by automobile via a…

  • Pennsylvanians are From Mars, Texans are From Venus

    I keep a close eye on the geographic characteristics of Twelve Mile Circle visitors, which seems natural for a geo-oddity website. I also generate article topics from viewer anomalies. For example, I never knew about Mars in Pennsylvania (map) until a Martian visitor, one from a spot north of Pittsburgh as it turned out, jumped…

  • Shortest International Borders

    It seemed obvious to me that I should have written an article about the shortest international border a long time ago. Well, apparently I’d overlooked it. So let’s rectify that oversight right now. The omission actually provided a benefit. I’d featured just about every one of these places in a previous Twelve Mile Circle articles…

  • What the Stravenue?

    Followers of Twelve Mile Circle are aware of my fascination with portmanteaus, the mashing together of two distinct words to form a single new word (see the portmanteau tag for several examples). So I stumbled across a new one, or at least a new one to me, as I attempted to find variations on Public…

  • Rapid Transit in 1844

    I’ve slowly been overhauling the non-12MC part of my website to upgrade to Google Maps API v3. That’s the portion for which I obtained the howderfamily.com domain long before Twelve Mile Circle became the tail wagging the dog. As part of that I revisited a genealogy page I wrote about ten years ago. It looked…

  • No Names and Nameless

    The article on Public Streets seemed generate more than the usual amount of interest and lots of great comments, as well as a hint of familiarity. Input from loyal reader David Overton sent me down an interesting tangent. He mentioned No Name Street, which he believed might be “another contender for ‘laziest street name’”. He…

  • Public Street

    I run into various oddities as I prepare 12MC articles so I catalog them and pack them away for future exploration. This happened recently as I compiled International Capitals in the USA. I poked around a promising area in Brooksville, Florida and found something completely unexpected. A street called Public Street. This struck me as…

  • Jeff Davis

    I received an interesting query from loyal reader “Katy” via the 12MC Google+(1) account the other day. She wanted to find towns named after people that included the namesakes’ first and last names.(2) Several possibilities came to mind and one name in particular, Jefferson Davis, kept recurring. Jefferson Davis — which I’ll mention primarily for…

  • Race Across America

    The recently concluded Dust Bowl Marathon Series continues to play on my mind. Five towns served as a home base during the event. Of course, each one of them rolled out the red carpet for us. Ulysses, Kansas stepped it up an additional notch above the high bar exhibited by the rest. They seemed to…

  • Most Remote Chinese Restaurants in North America

    I wonder if I’ve observed a genuine phenomenon or if I’m falling into a confirmation bias trap. Everywhere I travel, and I meander through extremely rural areas as a matter of preference, I notice Chinese restaurants. This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned this peculiarity. I posted Not Fusion, CONfusion a couple of years ago.…