Tag: Boston
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State Nickname Streets
I focused an inordinate amount of time and attention on Wikipedia’s List of U.S. State Nicknames as I wrote the Comparison Nicknames article. That wasn’t the original intent of the effort however, just an interesting byproduct that spun into its own topic. I’d been working on something else, something finally revealed today. It all began…
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Avoiding the Temptation
It sat there in front of me, so tempting, so wanting to be bestowed with a clickbait title on this 12MC article. I could have called it Sex Folk or maybe Folk Sex. Certainly that would have attracted some undeserved attention and a few extra eyeballs. However, for what purpose? People who come to the…
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Undignified Floods
Floods are awful in any form and I don’t wish to diminish or make light of that one overriding consideration. However there are floods of a “normal” variety — if an event so awful can be referred to so cavalierly — and then there are the truly bizarre. Either way, it leaves behind lost lives,…
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Bostonian Confusion and I Don’t Mean Massachusetts
I kept things vague when I discussed Boston — the Boston in Texas — in Named Like a Whole Other Country. I stopped at “the man who opened the first store in the area was W. J. Boston.” Otherwise I might have tipped my hand that I’d discovered three Texas Bostons all within about four…
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Named Like a Whole Other Country
What if I said that I could drive from Atlanta to Detroit, or Cleveland to Santa Fe, or Miami to Memphis in an hour and a half? So how about driving from Jacksonville to Buffalo in an hour? No, I didn’t say fly, I said drive. My apologies in advance to the international audience that…
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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…
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How Low Can it Go?
I stumble across the most fascinating bits of information in unexpected places. It happened this time as I examined the unusually-wide median strip between the eastbound and westbound lanes of Interstate 8 in southern California. Then I learned of a nearby oddity further down the highway while reviewing various roadfan websites. Interstate 8 A motorist…
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Over the Road
An image posted by reader Katy in a comment on my recent Tunnels, Bridges, Lifts and Inclines article completely captivated me. It shows a canal going over a road in the Netherlands. The interesting aspect, to me, is that a viewer can determine the actual depth of the canal. Highway engineers were kind enough to…
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W Towns Outside Boston
Reader “HH” brought an interesting situation outside of Boston, Massachusetts, to my attention this week. He discovered this many years ago and has been wondering about it every since. On the surface it doesn’t seem like much, just a ride along U.S. Route 20. It has a bit of historic importance in its own right,…
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Smoots Revisited
I’m still in Boston and I found my way over to the Harvard Bridge across the Charles River, connecting the Back Bay of Boston to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Nobody calls it a particularly remarkable bridge as far as those things go, but it does offer amazing views when the weather cooperates.…