Author: Twelve Mile Circle
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Editorial: Numerical Irrelevance
Fair warning, this article contains opinions and editorial content. You’re welcome to continue reading or come back in a couple of days. Then I’ll return to the more traditional mix of geo-oddities and weird locations. First, let me leave a note to myself in the Year 2050. Hopefully I’ll still be alive and writing 12MC,…
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Atlantic to Pacific
Regular readers of the Twelve Mile Circle seem to enjoy vicarious road challenges. Those include shortest routes, fastest times, greatest distances over specific times, and things of that nature. I featured the highway path from Canada to Mexico a few weeks ago. Now I’d like to explore the other direction across the United States. So…
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North AND South
It seemed like a typographical error, a town named North. That shouldn’t be an issue ordinarily although it looks very strange when the town falls within the boundaries of South Carolina, making it North, South Carolina. I swear I didn’t know about this video from “You Bet Your Life” before I found North on a…
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Humble Mississippi
Most everyone has an awareness of the Mississippi River no matter their cultural background or geographic familiarity. It would be like never hearing about the Amazon or the Nile. The Mississippi is one of the great rivers of the world and it drains a huge North American watershed. It’s a fixture. I’ve enjoyed this natural…
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Room to Grow
I got a wake-up call when I went into Google Analytics and took a look at the volume of Twelve Mile Circle readers by metropolitan area. That’s not a tab I normally examine. I’m much more interested in the state and town totals. I was taken aback because it suggested that there were a handful…
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One Star Many Centers
I stumbled upon an interesting point as I researched U.S. State Capital Surnames. While Austin, Texas may have been the first and only capital of Texas once it became part of the United States, it was not the original or by any means the only capital of the Republic of Texas. This isn’t the first…
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King of Portmanteau
If Portmanteau was a nation, Albert J. Earling would have been its king. By now most readers understand Twelve Mile Circle’s fascination with portmanteaus. It’s the birth of creative new words resulting from the smashing together two or more existing words. Previous articles dealing with this device included Mardela to Delmar and Dueling Portmanteau Placenames.…
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US State Capital Surnames
We’ve waded through surnames that paired with nations and those that matched U.S. states. Now it’s time for the third and final installment of this investigation. Let’s look at surnames that match capital cities of U.S. states. A quick summary of the rules — I pulled information from Frequently Occurring Surnames from Census 2000 [link…
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US State Surnames
The second installment on surnames involves instances that match U.S. state names. The rules are much the same as the national surnames discussion. The source remains Frequently Occurring Surnames from Census 2000 and complete matches are better than partial matches. Once again one should feel free to follow along at home using a shared Google…
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National Surnames
I received a query about surnames that were the same as nations. An example might be Captain America. Well, if indeed his first name was actually Captain and his surname was actually America instead of a pseudonym for Steve Rogers. And I guess while we’re at it, if he wasn’t a fictional character in a…