Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: International

  • Can’t Get Enough of Kossuth

    The formation and expansion of Kossuth County in the 1850’s discussed in The Odd Case of Iowa’s Largest County pointed to a simple question. So who was Kossuth? That string led me to Lajos Kossuth. I was wholly unfamiliar with the name. Also I wondered why a county deep within the American heartland would honor…

  • India Loves 12MC

    Twelve Mile Circle noticed increasing visitor traffic from India over the last couple of years and particularly within the last several months. Maybe that’s a recognition of growing Internet access within the subcontinent and perhaps a general improvement in its technological infrastructure. I’d prefer to think of it in simpler terms: India loves 12MC. This…

  • Streets Named After…

    We’ve all seen lists created from Google’s unusual auto-search recommendations. I noticed a few entertaining results as I looked for Streets Named After… well, I forget what I was searching for exactly because I was so enthralled by the false positives. Some were mundane. I expected streets named after celebrities, trees, birds, presidents and such,…

  • Seriously Broken

    The number of broken place names seemed amazing. I didn’t know what led people to memorialize broken objects, just noted that they they did and it amused me. Broken Lakes, Broken Ridges, Broken Points, Broken Valleys and on and on. The list was so exhaustive that I had a terrible time limiting my selection. So…

  • 81 on 81

    I’m planning a quick trip down to southwestern Virginia and neighboring West Virginia. Naturally I intend to count some new counties along the way although with other purposes too. I wish I could say it was entirely about the counties so I could finally finish Virginia. But that will have to wait for another day.…

  • Now You See It, Now You Don’t

    I thought about rivers, specifically those with segments that disappeared for awhile. It wasn’t about completely subterranean rivers although those were certainly fascinating in their own right. Rather, it was about surface rivers with underground components. I knew they existed because I had a hazy recollection of reading about one once. How rare were they,…

  • Woonerf

    In some places they’re called complete streets, home zones or shared spaces. However, I preferred the original Dutch term “woonerf” (pronounced VONE-erf). It described a concept as old as urban civilization itself although applied within a new context. It follows a very simple idea, a notion of streets shared by everyone. That concept took a…

  • Me and What Army

    The format today will be similar to the “Odds and Ends” series, a veritable pu pu platter of tasty tidbits. However, the primary difference will be that inspiration came almost entirely from the far corners of the 12MC army. I still have several other reader contributions waiting in the wings too. Please be patient if…

  • A Prisoner to Geo-Oddities

    I noticed a reference to a prison in Alaska that turned out to be located not too distant from where I roamed around the Kenai Peninsula during my journeys a few summers ago. It was a prison with a view, in fact it was located somewhere (map) in the background of this photo I took…

  • Hardly Tropic

    Technically, the tropics would be an area hugging the equator between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, between approximately 23°26′-or-so north and south. The two latitudes marked the extent the sun might appear directly overhead if only briefly on a single day, the summer solstice. Tropics also had a more widespread definition…