Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: International

  • Canada’s Pocket Desert

    Canada allegedly contains exactly one lonely desert, or maybe none at all. It depends on who you consult. They’ve also coined various names for the anomaly known colloquially as “Canada’s Pocket Desert” including Okanagan, Osoyoos and Nk’mip. Whatever the designation, it’s located adjacent to the Town of Osoyoos in southern British Columbia. So it sits…

  • Abundant Agglomerated Archipelagos

    Rather than call this “More Thousand Islands” and confuse it with the purpose of my recent celebratory Kiloanomaly, I came up with a new name. Rest assured, by mentioning abundant agglomerated archipelagos, I actually meant places other than the Thousand Islands poking above the Saint Lawrence River between Canada and the United states that share…

  • Just the -fax, Ma’am

    Police sergeant Joe Friday never actually said “just the facts ma’am” on the vintage television show Dragnet, according to Snopes. Rather, the character played by Jack Webb uttered different lines. People later confused things and created the classic phrase now erroneously attributed to the show. A similar confusion surrounded the suffix “-fax” appended to surnames…

  • Kiloanomaly

    What does one call a thousand geo-oddities? Ultimately I decided to use the metric prefix “Kilo,” although kilogeooddity and kilooddity both looked clunky with all of those extra vowels. Ultimately I coined the phrase kiloanomaly, equating to units of a thousand objects combining to form singular anomalies. It almost sounded like a Hawaiian word. I…

  • Land of Disco

    I came across an unusual neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina where many of the streets were named for different genres of dance. Why yes, it was a mobile home park. How did you guess? It further confirmed my theory that trailer parks have the best street names. They use labels that everyone would love to…

  • Bowls

    All that talk of bowling greens in the previous article increased my curiosity about the sport of bowls (or lawn bowls) in general. It’s similar to a family of Continental lawn bowling games including Bocce and Pétanque. Essentially, it spread wherever the British Empire extended. I’m not sure why I didn’t discover Bowls a couple…

  • Upstart Eclipses Namesake

    When I think of “New” places I tend to fuse together the full placenames mentally into a single phrase and begin to overlook the separate elements. I don’t forget completely that earlier entities inspired newer ones, although I mostly overlook the original namesake within the larger string. For example, if I considered Orléans in France…

  • When Planners Get Bored

    I’ve been collecting a bunch of oddly shaped and unusually themed neighborhoods and didn’t know what to do with them. They didn’t have any similarity amongst them, even appearing in completely different parts of the world, although I wondered if perhaps I could force them into a set anyway. The first notion that came to…

  • Boomerang

    The trails and breadcrumbs left behind by random one-time electronic visitors sometimes remind me of interesting things I’ve discussed previously and forgotten. Witness the recent query “boomerang” that led one anonymous reader to Fraser Island in Australia, the world’s largest sand island, and its amazing perched dune lakes. As I noted when I drafted the…

  • Countdown to Midnight

    Today I following the normal progression of articles as they post on Twelve Mile Circle. I felt somewhat obligated to publish an article even though it fell on New Years Eve. Yes, I can’t stop even on New Years Eve. Readers in Europe and places farther east won’t see this until 2014. They’ve already flipped…