Category: Miscellaneous
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Goin’ Down to Garland
I stumbled upon an old thread on the Straight Dope message boards discussing the naming of streets. Responsible parties included the usual cast of characters such as developers, county governments, planning commissions, city councils, working-level bureaucrats, and the like. One contributor on that message board mentioned that: “Several years ago, I was working with a…
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Reader Mailbag
This is a rather special edition in a long series of intermittent Odds and Ends articles. I will call it Reader Mailbag for the obvious reason. Yes, comments, emails and tweets from Twelve Mile Circle readers inspired this one more than anything else. These topics were all completely unknown to me previously. So maybe I…
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The Trouble with Records
I try to approach “-est” claims skeptically. Those are ones that purport to be the largest, tallest, longest, smallest, fastest, and so on. Often I’ll use qualifiers such as likely, possibly, or supposedly, to hedge my bets even when fact-checking seems to confirm an assertion. Predictably, someone in the 12MC audience will discover a more…
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Airports Named after Fictional Characters
Every once in awhile I post an article not necessarily for the 12MC audience, intended more as a public service to people who might come to the site for a highly specific purpose only a single time. I’m not always sure why I receive sudden website traffic surges, however I try to be accommodating. Often…
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Order in the Court
“Court” is one of many common suffixes used to describe streets or roads. It likely derived from a term that referred to an open-air interior space hemmed-in by the walls of a large building such as a castle, as in a courtyard. Generally, not always, a road appended with court denotes a very short non-connecting…
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Triple Letter
An unwary visitor arriving on the Twelve Mile Circle through some random search once again provided fodder for an article topic. The query forwarded by search software said: “name of the county, state and cities starts with s?” Usually this means someone is trying to complete an online geography contest or perhaps an old-school crossword…
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Shortline
That’s shortline (with a “t”) not shoreline. The term describes very small railroads. I first became aware of shortlines a couple of years ago when we took a brief trip to Vermont during early Autumn. One of our activities included an excursion along the western bank of the Connecticut River. We took that trip on…
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Most Remote Chinese Restaurants in North America
I wonder if I’ve observed a genuine phenomenon or if I’m falling into a confirmation bias trap. Everywhere I travel, and I meander through extremely rural areas as a matter of preference, I notice Chinese restaurants. This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned this peculiarity. I posted Not Fusion, CONfusion a couple of years ago.…
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International Capitals in the USA
The capital of a nation is often its most important city, or certainly one that citizens would recognize by name if not. Place that exact name into another nation and its significance would almost always drop. I wondered if I could find the name of every other capital city within the physical boundaries of the…
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Shaped Like it Sounds
I enjoyed filling in newly captured counties on my county counting map as a result of the recent Dust Bowl trip. The newly drawn map pleased me immensely, a nice block of color added to a previously-empty quadrant. Unfortunately I left behind a couple of doughnut-hole counties that I’ll probably never capture. That’s fine. I’ve…