Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Month: June 2014

  • What the?

    It couldn’t possibly be true, a place named for Dwayne Johnson a.k.a “The Rock”, the professional wrestler and actor? This guy had more than 15 million Twitter followers! That indicated someone of immense popularity, for sure. But would someone name an entire town for him? Meanwhile, Down in Georgia No, of course not. The Rock…

  • Spit

    I’ve certainly featured spits of land on 12MC before. They’ve come up in the context of Shingle Spits and in a very specialized sense in one of my favorite geographic forms, the always wonderful tombolo. I was able to visit a particularly nice example of a spit in Homer, on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. I’ve discussed…

  • Lockport

    The website hit came from Lockport, Illinois. Well, Lockport sounded familiar, although from a different time and place than Illinois. It also seemed quite descriptive, a lock on a canal combined with a port (or perhaps a portage). Locks would be ideal places for settlements during the heyday of canal travel a century or more…

  • Snipp, Snapp, Snorum, Hej Basalorum

    I don’t think I’ve ever milked three articles from a single small town before. So Earl Grey, a village in Saskatchewan struck the trifecta once I considered it’s origin. I’d mentioned in the previous article that one source said, “the district was then known as Snorum.” Did anyone else find that amusing? Snorum. It sounded…

  • Earl Grey

    The 12MC audience anticipated my next move again. It was “The Basement Geographer” this time. He flagged British prime minister Earl Grey and the Grey Cup in a comment responding to Gray vs. Grey. So I will cover that along with other topics today. I knew that could be a risk when I mentioned the…

  • Gray vs. Grey

    I’ve always had a terrible time remembering how to spell a certain word. It’s the one that describes a mixture of black and white. Should it be gray or grey? In a sense I understood that it depends upon geography. The adoption of simplified spelling in the United States through the efforts of people like…

  • Did Sir Walter Raleigh Get Drunk in Canada?

    I learned a new adage recently, Betteridge’s Law of Headlines: “Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no“. I’d already understood that mentally of course I just didn’t realize it had a name. Good to know. Naturally, Sir Walter Raleigh never indulged in intoxicants in Canada. The record…

  • More Weird Placenames

    I’m not posting one of those lists passed around the Intertubes. So you’ve all seen them and I’m certain you know what I mean. No Monkey’s Eyebrow or Turkey Scratch here. These are actual placenames that I’ve encountered as I’ve conducted the daily task of keeping Twelve Mile Circle current. They came from various sources…

  • Make Tracks to Midland

    So I had to admit it. My odd fascination with Every County’s slow-motion serial recitation of literally every county progressed towards an obsession. I couldn’t stop checking the author’s crawling pace once every few days. Then he arrived vicariously at Midland County, Michigan about a week ago where he noted that it “got its name…

  • Sault

    Twelve Mile Circle mentioned Sault Ste. Marie the other day, the name of two cities on opposite banks of the St. Marys River, one in Canada and the other in the United States. The curious prefix “sault” jumped-out of course, and while I was aware that it should be pronounced something akin to “soo” I’d…