Category: International
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All Vowel Place Names
I come across various language trivia lists on the Intertubes all the time. They cover a thousand different topics but some of them focus on words of unnatural length composed solely of vowels. It doesn’t take much to entertain me but you already knew that. They’re somewhat amusing but they do tend to stretch towards…
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Magic Roundabout
My childhood happened in a time before video games completely transformed the adolescent earth. Sure, we enjoyed a little screen time with those early Atari consoles but we also had plenty of non-electronic diversions too. I loved making intricate designs as they sprang forth from highly simplistic repetitive motions on a Spirograph. Those crazy geometric…
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Islands Below Sea Level
Are there any islands below sea level? The question seemed absurd on its surface when I noticed it lodged in my web logs in the form of a search engine query. However I’ve learned to not be so dismissive. I’ve uncovered increasingly obscure artifacts and encountered surprisingly unusual situations in the years I’ve written Twelve…
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Australia’s Longest Straight Line?
Lines continue to fascinate me, both imaginary and real. I found myself pondering the website of Australian Rail Maps, looking at their Western Australia page. I’d heard about a specific segment crossing the hauntingly desolate Nullarbor Plain and I intended to investigate it further. It’s here, between kilometre 797 west of Ooldea (South Australia) and…
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Åland Calling
I suppose I can break my own rules. If I admit to being hypocritical, does that make me a marginally less contemptible hypocrite or at least a more self-aware one? Perhaps not, but that’s what’s going to happen on Twelve Mile Circle today. I’ve said repeatedly that I plan to combine reports of initial national…
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More First-Timers
Every once in a great while, whenever I get a little curious and begin to wonder, I go back through my older web logs and see if I’ve recorded any more first-time international visitors. This is becoming an increasingly unusual discovery. I’ve been running Google Analytics for two-and-a-half years. Almost all sovereign nations of any…
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Odd Irish Border Road
New reader Ian, an Irish expat living in California, has an interest in border anomalies. He pointed out an instance in his native Ireland: the most direct road corridor between two points crosses an international border multiple times in the space of just a few miles. I am aware of a similar condition in the…
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Great White North(ish)
I came across another wonderful map as I reviewed the Dead Tree Media over the weekend. The City of Toronto bought a full-page advertisement hoping to entice tourists from the northeast United States to cross the border into Canada for a weekend or a few days. They presented several lighthearted graphics designed to attract the…
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Kenora, So Far Away
Many months ago, in what seems like a lifetime ago in the world of Twelve Mile Circle, I focused on rural Southwestern Virginia. I demonstrated through a simple mapping design that one distant corner of the state was closer to the capitals of eight other states than to its own capital of Richmond. This was…
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Mount Pearl Mystery
Why do I get such a disproportional number of visitors from Mount Pearl? It’s just a random small city in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. So is there something on Twelve Mile Circle that resonates with its 25,000 residents? Or does a small number of amazingly dedicated 12MC fans happen to live there? I am sure…