Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • 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,…

  • Islands Split by Time Zones

    I captured the query of an anonymous reader. He or she wanted to know whether there were an islands split by time zones. I’d never pondered that before but I came up with a couple of quick examples off the top of my head. That didn’t satisfy me so I turned to a worldwide time…

  • Longdon England. Yes with a G.

    So what happens when someone wants a map of London and accidentally fat-fingers the keyboard and spells it “Longdon?” Google Maps still processes the request but it doesn’t return one of the most significant cities in the world as one originally intended. The results are considerably more humble. Worcestershire Even more amazingly, there are at…

  • Improbable Connections

    What do the following three entities all have in common?: An obscure Union general from the American Civil War A well-known advertising icon A poisonous weed Improbably, a single tenuous thread actually connects each of these items. I imagine that it’s nearly impossible to associate these widely varied topics unless one stumbles upon the answer…

  • New Highpoint for the Netherlands

    My brief vacation in Vermont over the weekend must have distracted me. Somehow I completely missed the news about the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles on October 10, 2010. So it took an email message from loyal reader Greg to bring its true significance to my attention. I’m not referring to the dissolution of the…

  • Autumn Weekend in Vermont

    My wife and I took the kids on a roadtrip, a brief vacation over the Columbus Day holiday. We drove up to Vermont and remained there for a few days in the crisp autumn weather. We experienced rolling countryside, amazing Fall foliage and natural beauty in abundance. I’ll be sure to post some of those…

  • Rock Bands with Geographic Names

    The idea started, as it often does, with a random search engine query recorded in my web logs. A member of the public wanted to know something about an alternative rock band that she followed. It didn’t matter who she was or where she lived. She asked and I indulged. Bethany Curve The band was…

  • The Misplaced County Seat

    We’ve had lots of talk recently about inconveniently located state capitals and misaligned county seats. We’ve mined that thread for about all it’s worth so this is the last one for awhile, I promise. However, while I was conducting that research I came across an instance where the county seat is completely misplaced, and yet…

  • Nobody Wants to Visit Vinalhaven?

    I purposely feature somewhat obscure sites on the Twelve Mile Circle. Thus, my visitors tend to fall into two categories: Those who consider themselves connoisseurs of geo-oddities. Those who visit a single time because a search engine told them they should come here. Predictability I’ve become pretty adept at watching the news cycles. Often I…

  • 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…

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…