Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Damfino

    I received an interesting tip by email about an old street in San Antonio, Texas identified as “Damfino” (as in “Damn if I know”). Our reader even provided a copy of an 1885 map for the online Library of Congress collection, which I’ve excerpted below. He theorized that the street name may have been a…

  • Studios to Towns

    I began to sense a pattern as I examined a map of Los Angeles, California recently. The movie industry has left its fingerprints upon the names of various places scattered throughout the basin and into the San Fernando Valley. This doesn’t surprise me, I’ve just never noticed it before. Let’s make sure we have the…

  • Loyal Reader Joe

    Those of you expecting a geography topic may be a bit disappointed with this article. Feel free to jump down directly to the “totally unrelated” section or return in a couple of days when I get back to the usual content. Today I diverge completely to another one of my favorite topics, my ongoing battle…

  • Proof! West Coast Sunrise over Water

    I mentioned Mathew Hargreaves’ achievement a few weeks ago. He was the reader who undertook a two-year effort to document a genuine West Coast Sunrise over Water. He described his efforts as they unfolded in a series of comments on that earlier article. We speculated that one might be able to witness this unusual geo-oddity…

  • European Capitals of New York

    New York is certainly an international locale, a player on the world stage attracting people from every corner of the world. It has been that way for a long time, a point of debarkation for more than two centuries. Perhaps I should expect to see the names of so many European capitals diffused within the…

  • My Little Poni

    I completed my annual business trip to Williamsburg, Virginia earlier this week. I’ve featured articles arising from these periodic visits in the past including A Colonial Capital, The Jamestown-Scotland Ferry and Revisiting the Swap. I felt like I’d mined that area rather extensively. I had no plans to report anything further. Something made me smile…

  • Rocky Mountain High

    One would be tempted to think that I’m a huge fan of the late John Denver given that I’ve featured his signature performances not once, but now a second time. I have a rather neutral feeling for his body of work, actually. His songs don’t inspire me but they don’t repel me either; they’re simply……

  • Sundog

    I mentioned Goldfield, Nevada recently. There I noticed a street called Sundog Avenue that looked like the kind of place where one could experience a sundog in person. Then I tucked the thought away for a few days until I had more time to explore it. A sundog describes a specific atmospheric condition that allows…

  • Ten Seats in North Carolina

    Could there possibly be ten county seats in North Carolina that bear the name of different counties? I remained skeptical when I saw the query in my web logs. I figured they probably got the question wrong; they must have meant ten county seats sharing a name with their home county. So, I stand corrected.…

  • Better Sister Cities

    Sister Cities International’s mission promotes “peace through mutual respect, understanding, & cooperation — one individual, one community at a time.” I find that laudable although I wonder how they establish these relationships. Does it involve some sort of affinity perspective or does someone simply say, “hey, wanna be our sister city?” My hometown — Arlington,…

Latest Comments

  1. I’ve enjoyed your Hawaii reports. I’ve visited 4 times, between 1976 and 2007, but no plans to return. In 1976…

  2. The British flag continues to fly at Roche Harbor, a couple miles north of English Camp.

  4. Been there Once for a few years. In 76 &77. Ran cooperative store. Even though it was very isolated It…

  5. As an Alaskan I always wondered why Interstates were a big deal. From my point of view a road went…