Category: Cities/Towns

  • Exclamatory Towns!

    I intended to focus on places that have punctuation included as part of their official names. I found two basic categories: those with an apostrophe denoting a possessive; and well, that’s about it. Undeterred, I searched further and eventually found three towns with exclamation points. Excited in Westward Ho! The name of a town in…

  • The Jeffersons and Beyond

    I stumbled across a geo-oddity as I worked on one of my other hobbies (genealogy): one family line had a connection with Watertown, in Jefferson County, Wisconsin; and a member of that same family had a connection to Watertown, in Jefferson County, New York. I’d never come across a situation where two states had towns…

  • Visiting Oz

    And I don’t mean Australia. There are several ways to distinguish oneself on Twelve Mile Circle. One path takes awhile. Stick around here long enough, post a bunch of comments and eventually I’ll get to know you and write an article that I think will appeal to you directly, maybe seriously, maybe somewhat frivolously. Another…

  • St. John’s at Long Last

    I made an offer to the kind readers of Twelve Mile Circle back in September 2010. I said I’d be glad to explore and present geo-oddities for any location based on user suggestions. So I took this as a personal challenge and an opportunity to investigate areas that may have escaped my attention previously. “Katy”…

  • There’s a Juno in Texas but not in Alaska

    Did any Alaskan readers of Twelve Mile Circle watch the NBC Nightly News this evening? When did your state capital become Juno? I happened to be sort-of watching it in the background as I was working on an article I’ll post tomorrow. The story centered on a Next Generation air traffic control system using satellite…

  • Right Up to the Line (again)

    This is my second attempt to present this article, following the debacle yesterday evening when I posted a rough outline. That was the first time I’d hit the publish button prematurely in nearly 500 articles. I suppose it was bound to happen eventually. Hopefully it didn’t cause too much confusion. The whole point of this…

  • Closest Antipodal National Capitals

    It’s odd that I keep getting random search engine hits on the phrase, “closest antipodal national capitals” when I’ve never covered the topic on Twelve Mile Circle. Meanwhile, several other websites have covered it rather extensively. The whole topic of antipodes in general seems to receive an inordinate amount of attention. I found a series…

  • Farm to Market Roads

    I realized I might give away the secret for today’s topic when I released my recent article, Farm to Market. Sure enough, loyal and very observant reader Benjamin Lukoff noticed the foreshadowing and mentioned something familiar in his comment.[1] Another article also figures into the triad although it’s not nearly as intuitive. The strangely popular…

  • Farm to Market

    I have food on my mind. It’s Thanksgiving morning here in the United States and food is a big part of that. I image we’ll have very few U.S. readers today. Most of them will be feasting on turkey, watching the American version of “football,” and getting mentally prepared to hit the shopping malls tomorrow…

  • More Oddities in Washington, DC

    It was great to be offered an opportunity to submit a guest post on Google Sightseeing, following in the footsteps of Kyle Kusch of The Basement Geographer. Google Sightseeing is one of my all-time favorite blogs and I read it often. So it was a pleasure working with its principal authors, Alex and James Turnbull.…