Month: April 2017

  • Any Excuse for a Road Trip, Part 3 (Cape Girardeau)

    My brief Easter Weekend road trip focused the majority of its time on Cape Girardeau, Missouri. That consisted of a couple of hours poking around downtown on Friday evening and then the race the following morning. Nonetheless it still consumed the bulk of our waking hours in a single location. We initially rolled into town…

  • Any Excuse for a Road Trip, Part 2 (Short Haul)

    Now I needed to execute my ambitious plan, a long weekend drive that would result in my capture of 24 previously unvisited counties. Friday, the first day, covered fewer miles than Saturday or Sunday. However, I made up for that shorter distance with plenty of sightseeing activities. I’d never traveled between St. Louis and Cape…

  • Any Excuse for a Road Trip, Part 1 (The Premise)

    People following Twelve Mile Circle’s Twitter account knew something must be happening. Suddenly tweets tagged to places like Ste. Genevieve and Cape Girardeau in Missouri began to appear on my feed just before Easter. I hadn’t announced the trip ahead of time although I’d been planning it for several weeks. I’ve been aiding and abetting…

  • Directional Surname Frequency

    I spotted South Street in Manly, Iowa as I wrote Even More Manly Places. Ordinarily that wouldn’t generate much attention. For some reason I found it entertaining to see a South with an east and a west. One could go to East South or West South, although apparently nowhere southeast or southwest. Ditto for North…

  • Even More Ladylike Places

    Most readers probably anticipated that after slogging through Manly Places, Even More Manly Places, and Ladylike Places, that the next in this series would be Even More Ladylike Places. That seemed absolutely necessary in my mind to create symmetry and closure. However I’d written a variation on this theme already with the recently-published Ladysmith. I…

  • Ladylike Places

    The recent Manly Places dealt with U.S. locations that swung wildly towards an overabundance of men. Naturally I also wanted to examine the opposite condition. The inverse of manly seemed as if it should be something like ladylike so that’s what I called the followup article. However, this one required more effort. Women lived longer…

  • Even More Manly Places

    I didn’t realize the earlier Manly Places would get much of a reaction. Actually the title did suggest an element of foreshadowing. Everyone in the Twelve Mile Circle audience who thought it should have featured places named Manly, go ahead and take a bow. I intended to link the previous article to this one all…

  • Manly Places

    Where does the highest ratio of men live? An unknown visitor to Twelve Mile Circle posed that question in a recent search query. I didn’t learn why they wanted to know because I didn’t have a means to contact the person to ask. Nonetheless it seemed like an interesting query and I’d never considered it…

  • Bizarre Broomfield Borders

    Recently Twelve Mile Circle focused a couple of articles on the boundaries of Virginia’s independent cities. That led loyal reader Scott Surgent to comment on an equally strange situation in Broomfield County, Colorado. I certainly knew about Broomfield because of its status as one of the newest and smallest of U.S. counties. It didn’t exist…