Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Miscellaneous

  • New Difference

    The recent 12MC article Small Change, Big Difference created an unusual amount of interest. One comment from reader Ross arrived embedded with a challenge: “This reminds me of a question I’ve often wondered: Which place changes the most when you add ‘New’ in front of the name? In other words: Which ‘New’ place is the…

  • Cornfield

    I wouldn’t quite call it a groundswell. However, more than one hundred different people searched for “cornfield” on Twelve Mile Circle over the last five years. So obviously readers want an article based on cornfields and I shall oblige. Never say that 12MC doesn’t respond to its loyal fans. I interpreted cornfield to mean Corn…

  • Five Years of Searching

    Twelve Mile Circle featured an article with the curious title Search for Search and Other Tales about two years ago. This effort examined a year’s worth of search queries that people entered into the website. To be clear as before, these weren’t random searches from Google or other sources, these were actual words or phrases…

  • Small Change, Big Difference

    It struck me that Cheyenne (the capital city of the U.S. state of Wyoming) and Cayenne (the capital city of the French overseas department of Guyane française) sounded remarkably similar in name. Yet, as locations go they couldn’t be more dissimilar even though only a couple of letters and a slight voice inflection separated them.…

  • Bogus

    The word “bogus” had a murky history. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it may have dated back as far as 1827, used in Ohio as a slang term for a counterfeiter’s apparatus. Somehow it became the name of a machine used to manufacture fake coins. Then bogus became counterfeit or fake in a more…

  • Few Remain

    It had been a long time since I checked the visitor logs for new readers arriving from countries that had not ever landed on the pages of Twelve Mile Circle previously. I’d pretty much given up on that specific pursuit after tracking seven years of 12MC, figuring I’d already received what I was going to…

  • Particularly Possessive

    I noticed that Prince George’s County, Queen Anne’s County and St. Mary’s County — all in Maryland — included the genitive apostrophe to form their possessive constructions. I’d always taken it on faith that the United States Board on Geographic Names disallowed apostrophes for that specific purpose. That’s how we ended-up with Harpers Ferry and…

  • Brewerytown

    Twelve Mile Circle reflects my personal interests including those that transcend geo-oddities. Those include my fascination with zymurgy and breweriana. Recent examples included Geo-BREWities and More Geo-BREWities that examined breweries referencing geography within their names. I do try to tie these themes back to geography in some manner since that’s the notional objective of 12MC.…

  • Convergence at the End

    A weird pattern emerged as I researched an article a couple of months ago and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Was it a geo-oddity or simply an oddity? Would it fit within the subject matter of Twelve Mile Circle? Would some readers find it too bizarre? Ultimately I decided I could focus…

  • Skewed Perspective

    There was a time in the early days of Twelve Mile Circle when I used to devote entire articles to differences in distances that didn’t seem plausible, although of course the actual measurements didn’t lie. For example, sticking with the Twelve theme, the twelfth article I ever posted on 12MC all the way back in…