Tag: Newfoundland

  • Saint Alban Spreads

    Various saints appeared in recent Twelve Mile Circle articles, most recently On the Feast Day. I didn’t intent to fixate on them. The names of saints, both notable and obscure, kept coming to my attention as I researched other articles. I couldn’t simply ignore them. Take Saint Alban, for instance. Perhaps if I lived in…

  • On the Feast Day

    Recently I highlighted a couple of places named for holy figures because they were discovered on those particular saints’ feast days. Those included Saint Martin in Southernmost Bangladesh and various Christmas designations discovered on December 25. Many of the European nations with strong seafaring traditions participated. The Spanish, Portuguese, French and English all “discovered” distant…

  • Mundane First Name Places

    Twelve Mile Circle received a visit from someone in Susanville, California (map) last week, landing right on the front page of the site. What an odd name for a town, I figured. It had to have a story. Who was Susan and why did she have a town named for her? Couldn’t the town founders…

  • Fighting Words

    If someone named a town “Battle” then I would expect that it might commemorate a great conflict taking place nearby. I believed most logical people would find that a reasonable conclusion. So I examined several occurrences and discovered that it wasn’t necessarily the case. Usually the battles referenced were rather inconsequential or not even battles…

  • Skewed Perspective

    There was a time in the early days of Twelve Mile Circle when I used to devote entire articles to differences in distances that didn’t seem plausible, although of course the actual measurements didn’t lie. For example, sticking with the Twelve theme, the twelfth article I ever posted on 12MC all the way back in…

  • Countdown to Midnight

    Today I following the normal progression of articles as they post on Twelve Mile Circle. I felt somewhat obligated to publish an article even though it fell on New Years Eve. Yes, I can’t stop even on New Years Eve. Readers in Europe and places farther east won’t see this until 2014. They’ve already flipped…

  • Placentia is Not a Flat Cake

    The trouble with words that look almost alike is that they can mean completely different things. Case in point, I noticed a 12MC website hit from a visitor in Placentia, a town in Newfoundland & Labrador, in Canada. I seemed to recall somewhere in the recesses of my mind that there was also a Placentia…

  • Completely Random

    I happened to pop onto the 12MC Clustr Map as I like to do occasionally because I’m strange like that and I enjoy watching visitor statistics in real time, and a certain placename caught my eye: Random Lake, Wisconsin. It seemed — and you knew where I’d take this — so incredibly random. “Where do…

  • What the Drung?

    While we’re speaking of street suffixes — we were just speaking of street suffixes, weren’t we — and after the stravenue encounter, 12MC stumbled upon a suffix of even more weirdness: Drung. Imagine, living not on a street, an avenue, a boulevard, a drive or even a terrace, rather a drung. Drung used in this…

  • Captains Less Prestigious

    I had no trouble finding populated places named for Captain James Cook, the legendary 18th Century explorer and navigator, along the edges of the waters he sailed. However, plenty of other captains sailed the oceans during that same period. Naturally I wondered if the maps memorialized others similarly. Could I find other places named “Captain…