Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Author: Twelve Mile Circle

  • 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,…

  • Think of the Children

    Regular readers should feel free to skip today’s article. It’s intended to help out a very specific segment of one-time visitors. It’s time for another installment of “Help the Kids with their Homework.”ā„¢ The question I keep seeing likely derives from a mathematics assignment, but it also has a nice geography twist. It’s been all-the-rage…

  • Revisiting the Swap

    It’s not every day that I get an opportunity for a do-over. I was in Williamsburg, Virginia during the early part of this week. It’s so tantalizingly close to The Swap that I featured a few weeks ago. I travel to Williamsburg about once a year on business and I have mixed feelings about the…

  • County with (Another) State’s Name

    It makes great intuitive sense for a state to include a component county with the same name. Imagine living in Oklahoma City. Not only do the residents live in a city named Oklahoma, they also live in a county and a state named Oklahoma. That’s not imaginative, in fact it’s rather boring. Ditto for Arkansas,…

  • Islands Split by Time Zones

    I captured the query of an anonymous reader. He or she wanted to know whether there were an islands split by time zones. I’d never pondered that before but I came up with a couple of quick examples off the top of my head. That didn’t satisfy me so I turned to a worldwide time…

  • Longdon England. Yes with a G.

    So what happens when someone wants a map of London and accidentally fat-fingers the keyboard and spells it “Longdon?” Google Maps still processes the request but it doesn’t return one of the most significant cities in the world as one originally intended. The results are considerably more humble. Worcestershire Even more amazingly, there are at…

  • Improbable Connections

    What do the following three entities all have in common?: An obscure Union general from the American Civil War A well-known advertising icon A poisonous weed Improbably, a single tenuous thread actually connects each of these items. I imagine that it’s nearly impossible to associate these widely varied topics unless one stumbles upon the answer…

  • New Highpoint for the Netherlands

    My brief vacation in Vermont over the weekend must have distracted me. Somehow I completely missed the news about the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles on October 10, 2010. So it took an email message from loyal reader Greg to bring its true significance to my attention. Iā€™m not referring to the dissolution of the…

  • Autumn Weekend in Vermont

    My wife and I took the kids on a roadtrip, a brief vacation over the Columbus Day holiday. We drove up to Vermont and remained there for a few days in the crisp autumn weather. We experienced rolling countryside, amazing Fall foliage and natural beauty in abundance. I’ll be sure to post some of those…

  • Rock Bands with Geographic Names

    The idea started, as it often does, with a random search engine query recorded in my web logs. A member of the public wanted to know something about an alternative rock band that she followed. It didn’t matter who she was or where she lived. She asked and I indulged. Bethany Curve The band was…