Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: International

  • Congrats or Something

    It was like one of those mystery shopping contests where someone enters a store and suddenly confetti and balloons rain from the ceiling when the one-millionth customer crosses the threshold, and wins a big prize. Except it was four thousand. And I couldn’t provide anything valuable. Congratulations to “Peter” for posting Twelve Mile Circle’s 4000th…

  • Shaped Like it Sounds (Street Edition)

    Several months ago, right after I returned from my Dust Bowl trip and tallied my new County Counts, I noticed that one of them, Lincoln County, Colorado was sort-of shaped like the letter L. So that led to Shaped Like it Sounds, a brief collection of States, Counties and Towns that mirrored the first letter…

  • Three Letter Oddities

    I mentioned OGG as the three-letter airport code for Kahului Airport on the Hawaiian island of Maui in the Middling article for no greater significance than I found it amusing. And it sounded like something a caveman might say. A little Intertubes sleuthing led me to an easy explanation at Airport ABCs, an article reprinted…

  • Résumé Bait and Switch

    New reader “Thomas” sent an email to 12MC concerning an institution of higher learning seemingly out of place geographically. The University of California has a number of affiliated campuses, although none of them are located in Pennsylvania. Yet, oddly there’s a California University of Pennsylvania. As always, there was a twist to the situation as…

  • New Arrivals

    There are very few places in the world that have never sent a visitor to Twelve Mile Circle in the several years since I started the site. Nonetheless I check my access statistics for any new arrivals along with all the rest of my borderline obsessive-compulsive reader behavior examinations. I conducted the last comprehensive check…

  • Municipally Owned Telephone

    Many municipalities have considered or have already started to provide broadband services to their residents directly. They intentionally bypass numerous commercial enterprises that specialize in those functions. There were more than 100 cities doing that already just in the United States alone in 2011. Control over speed and pricing offered one big reason. A desire…

  • Odds and Ends 10

    I have an abundance of half-formed story ideas, an overflowing mailbag and a cornucopia of reader suggestions. That means it must be time once again for Odds and Ends, my recurring series of features and topics not quite large enough to fill an entire article on their own. A couple of interesting items came to…

  • Separate but Tallest

    Sometime examining something from a different angle provides interesting results. Other times it provides only the previous results, just with a different angle. Today it was the latter albeit with one unrelated twist at the end. I thought about a 12MC article from 2010, New Highpoint for the Netherlands. It pointed out the interesting situation…

  • British Roads Oddities

    I spent quite a long time, probably a solid couple of hours going through the British Roads FAQ on Roads.org.uk. I found map locations for those that fascinated me the most. It presented an extensive FAQ and I’ve shared a small sample of questions and explanations below. Links and all due credit should go to…

  • Capital Highpoints

    I once climbed to the top of the not-too-impressive highpoint of the District of Columbia. It’s even subway accessible, and you know I’m all about easy highpointing. The District highpoint is kind-of equivalent to a state highpoint — some lists include it and others do not — and that was a convenient loophole to add…