Category: International
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Auckland Origins
I wondered about the weirdest things while I planned my most recent trip. For instance, how did the largest city in New Zealand get its name? And why would anyone need to know that ahead of time? A thousand different details I needed to nail down and somehow that one insignificant notion became a concern.…
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12MC Coming to New Zealand and Australia
A funny thing happened on the way to Oklahoma City, where I hoped to spend our summer 2018 holiday chasing new counties. The family overruled me. My wife pointed out that our older son will be on his own soon. He’ll be off to college in a couple of years. Opportunities for family vacations will…
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Three of Them
Sequences of three came to mind, a trio of possibilities. Little did I know that so many places also focused on a similar theme. I found an abundance of opportunities. Of course, that equated to long lists for me to review as I started searching for something memorable. By “memorable” I meant to me personally.…
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Highest Numbered Street
Newer cities created on grid patterns often used street naming systems based on numbers. The closest street to an important urban feature became 1st Street. Numbers increased from there. Distinct patterns emerged in different cities, of course. Maybe numbered streets increased outward in two directions, north and south or east and west. Plenty of other…
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Big Time
Quite awhile ago, Twelve Mile Circle looked at some Remarkable Sundials. I found some rather amazing timepieces in a lot of different places, some of them quite large. Now I wondered about the largest actual clock with a face and hands. I didn’t know why the notion suddenly came to me after the passage of…
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Fire
It seemed like wildfires burned all across the American West this summer, each one worse than the other. A fire in Montana burned so long and so intensely that many nearby towns experience perpetual nightfall for days. Amazingly, the fires of 2017 stripped an area as big as the state of Maryland. For the European…
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Even More Spooky
It served me right for trying to guess what might please the Twelve Mile Circle audience. Longtime readers know that I’ve never been able to do that in the past even after all these years of trying. I probably should have waited until closer to Halloween. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this series — the exact locations…
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More Spooky
Twelve Mile Circle examined several infamous places in Spooky. I came up with a long list of possibilities to review although I had room for only a bare few in that first attempt. That led me to the conclusion that I should write another installment. There’s no sense wasting any more time so let’s get…
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Spooky
A lot of tangential articles began to appear on social media recently, tying-in with the hype around the latest film adaption of Stephen King’s “It.” One article I noticed included a list of his major works, from the early days of his writing career to the present. It included “The Shining,” and rightly so; a…
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Smallest Country on Two Oceans
While I researched the Smallest Multiple Time Zone Countries I noticed that a small corner of Chile actually abutted the Atlantic Ocean. Thousands of kilometres of its coastline hugged the Pacific Ocean and that one tiny little corner curved and extended far enough to reach the Atlantic. I enjoyed that meaningless anomaly for some unknown…