Tag: New Mexico
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Playing Games
Twelve Mile Circle felt like playing games. More to the point, I’d collected a few town names tied to games that I wanted to share. I did something similar awhile ago with the sport of Lawn Bowls, a particularly popular choice for names. Atlantic City also made the cut with Monopoly although the town inspired…
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Arizona’s Wandering Capital
The article I discovered was more than a year old, although it was new to me when I spotted it. The title intrigued me, Did You Know: Capital Of Arizona Moved 4 Times Before Settling In Phoenix. No, actually I didn’t know that. I’ve featured similar stories of wandering capitals for other states such as…
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Comparison Nicknames
I enjoyed reading Wikipedia’s List of U.S. State Nicknames recently. My amusement didn’t come from the familiar nicknames I already knew, rather it derived from the nicknames I never knew existed. Alabama was the Lizard State? Really? Did anyone else know that? Then I noticed that several of the states featured nicknames that compared them…
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Last Presidential Counties
Reader Steve Spivey contacted Twelve Mile Circle and floated an idea about U.S. counties named for presidents. He’d traveled through Taylor County in Georgia and recalled a Taylor County in Florida. Could they be related? Well yes, they bore the name of the 12th President of the United States, Zachary Taylor. That led him to…
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Officially Tilde
I received a message recently from a 12MC reader in Cañon City, Colorado. I couldn’t help noticing the tilde, the little squiggle over the letter “ñ.” That of course was punctuation used in Spanish, not English, so it caught my eye. Very few places in the United States include diacritical marks recognized officially by the…
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Not the Usual State Capital Trivia
It was time to clear my list of unwritten articles again. While doing that I noticed several of them involved state capitals, or their capitol buildings. Well, I’m not sure what the “usual” State Capital trivia might be much less the unusual. Nonetheless, let’s consider this an article on topics that the average layperson may…
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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…
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Pueblo Deco
I learned about an uncommon, unusual design style known as Pueblo Deco as I researched Pre-Nazi Swastika Architectural Details. Native American tribes of the US Southwest such as the Navajo used a symbol that that the general public today would call a swastika. That element carried forward to some of the derivative Pueblo Deco buildings…
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Sensing Senses
Five senses came to mind; sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. They were very traditional human-centric senses I conceded, given various other senses in existence like echolocation, magnetoception and others. So I ignored those. I also ignored the so-called sixth sense, extrasensory perception, ESP. But you already knew that, though (kidding!). Could I find five…
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Pre-Nazi Swastika Architectural Details
I traveled into the Twelve Mile Circle — the Delaware geo-oddity that inspired the name for this site — while visiting with some dear friends last weekend. In Wilmington, at Rodney Square specifically, I happened to glance up. There I noticed the wonderful Egyptian Revival architectural details on the Wilmington Public Library. My earlier Egyptian…