Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • The Country Club Dispute

    The Country Club Dispute came up from time-to-time in reader comments over the years. It’s one of those situations I’ve known about for awhile. Nonetheless, I placed in my pile of unused topics, and finally summoned enough motivation to write about today. It sounds like two snobby gentlemen with upturned noses and green blazers whacking…

  • The Other Mount Vernon

    I posted an article a few days ago that I called The Other White House. I thought I was being rather topical by posting it on Presidents Day, featuring a bunch of White Houses that shared nothing in common with the famous one in Washington, DC except for a name. So I felt pretty smug,…

  • Impressive Pedestrian Bridges

    Plans change. I gamble when I choose to mull over a thought and allow it to percolate in my mind. Sometimes the delay results in a better article. Other times, events overtake ideas not completely formed yet. Loyal reader “Rhodent” and I were communicating by email about a potential offshoot of “NOT as the Crow…

  • Starting from Zero

    I used the Zero Milestone marker in Washington, DC as the center of my circle a few weeks ago in Odds and Ends 6. It occurred to me that maybe I’d not talked about this marker before. That seemed odd in itself. That’s because I include it on all of my DC tours for friends…

  • Name That Smell

    Smells have a way of sticking with people. Everyone knows when they drive past a petrochemical factory, a paper mill, a landfill or a sewage treatment plant. The geographic location becomes lodged in one’s mind with a full set of highly-charged negative associations. I’m going to toss all of those aside. Instead I’m flipping the…

  • Search for Search and Other Tales

    Longtime readers may recall my fascination with people who come to Twelve Mile Circle, click on the search box on the upper-right corner of the page and then search the word “search.” I don’t pretend to understand the logic although I’ve come to accept it. There is an odd chink in the human psyche that…

  • Pick a Lane. Any Lane

    Roads. I’ve been thinking about roads a lot lately. I’m not sure how that morphed into a search for the road with the most lanes, but that’s where it ended this evening. San Diego, California, USA Lots of other people have wondered the same thing. That allowed me to cherry-pick various lists and collections for…

  • The Other White House

    It was Presidents Day in the United States yesterday, a fact likely known by much of the 12MC audience although perhaps not by many people outside the nation. So I posted an image and a brief message on my Findery page. [UPDATE: Unfortunately the site appears to be defunct now] I wasn’t feeling very wordy,…

  • NOT as the Crow Flies

    All due credit for the article today goes to a reader using the pseudonym “Wangi.” He sent me an email message offline noting an interesting situation, which by implication suggested the basis for another contest. I even stole the title of the current article from him. Thank you, Wangi! There’s nothing unusual going on here,…

  • Checkerboarding

    Checkerboarding has nothing to do with the game of checkers other than bearing a striking resemblance to its playing surface. Nor is it some awful new interrogation technique invented to pry information from suspects under duress. It is this. I discovered the anomaly on Google Maps in Oregon awhile ago while discussing Latitude Longitude Sequences…

Latest Comments

  2. what is the total population that lives now in the land given back to Virginia should it be part of…

  5. Park ranger at Chalmette (New Orleans) Battlefield let me pull up the Union Jack 20 years ago. My dad would…