Category: U.S. States
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Potomac in Oregon
Is there a Potomac River in Oregon? I’m only aware of the one that forms a boundary between Virginia and Maryland/Washington, DC and out to West Virginia. However, I’ve been receiving a slow but steady trickle of search engine queries on the topic for the last several weeks. Maybe I’m missing something. Is there a…
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What’s “Almost Heaven?”
We examined a song containing a blatant geographic inaccuracy in a recent article, “In Them Old Cotton Fields.” I left a hint for readers when I stated that I too took offense at a song with an equally irritating error, one having to do with the Mountain State. Many of you probably knew the answer…
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Car Talk State Name Answer
I’m not a listener of the Car Talk radio show. However, apparently they do a Puzzler each week and people try to send them the correct answer by email. I know this because my website gets hammered by Google searches anytime they deal with geographic trivia. I guess there aren’t many geo-oddity sites on the…
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In Them Old Cotton Fields
Little did reader Ian Dunbar realize that he struck a nerve when he commented on the Bordersplit article. It had nothing to do with his fine words or sentiment. I was in total agreement. Glaring geographical errors in songs grate on my nerves too. My nemesis happens to be a completely different musical composition but…
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It Counts but It’s Pitiful
We’ve had a lively discussion in the comments in relation to the “I’ve Barely Been There” article. I described the official 12MC Rules in the original article: if I touch the geographic area, no matter how briefly, I count it as a visit. I defined “touch” as anything more than flying over it. One doesn’t…
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I’ve Barely Been There
I’ve been to all of the 50 United States as is true with several others of you who read Twelve Mile Circle regularly. In fact, that’s what got me started on the strange hobby of County Counting. I ran out of things to count so I had to break the individual states into their sub-units…
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Farm to Market Roads
I realized I might give away the secret for today’s topic when I released my recent article, Farm to Market. Sure enough, loyal and very observant reader Benjamin Lukoff noticed the foreshadowing and mentioned something familiar in his comment.[1] Another article also figures into the triad although it’s not nearly as intuitive. The strangely popular…
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Jackson’s Mill (39°05’49.19″N, 80°28’00.72″W)
It’s not everyday that an advertisement comes complete with a mysterious Latitude/Longitude coordinate. My local newspaper included a special section on the upcoming 150th anniversary of the Civil War in the United States. This image from West Virginia filled the entire back page. The copy reads, “A nation was nearly torn in half. A state…
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County with (Another) State’s Name
It makes great intuitive sense for a state to include a component county with the same name. Imagine living in Oklahoma City. Not only do the residents live in a city named Oklahoma, they also live in a county and a state named Oklahoma. That’s not imaginative, in fact it’s rather boring. Ditto for Arkansas,…
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Bakersfield: A Better California Capital?
We had a lot of fun and some great comments during the discussion of state capitals most inconvenient to the residents of the states’ largest cities. I mentioned that I’d found the U.S. Census Bureau’s list of Population Centers by State from the year 2000 census. Naturally I took the last two questions from the…