Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • 4 Nations, 2 Tripoints, 1 Lake

    I thought I’d written an article about Africa’s Lake Chad a long time ago. Naturally I was surprised to see it still listed on my potential topics spreadsheet when I culled it recently. A quick search of the 12MC WordPress database found minor references to Lake Chad and little else. So I guess I should…

  • Laguna del Carbón

    I’ve written about elevation lowpoints previously including Lake Assal (Africa), Lake Eyre (Australia) and Death Valley (North America). It’s been awhile since I wrote about one of those. Naturally this seemed like a good opportunity to turn my attention to South America. I don’t provide as much content about that area as I should, probably…

  • Wyoming, More Than Just a State

    A visitor arrived on Twelve Mile Circle the other day from Wyoming, Iowa. Certainly I was acutely aware of the State of Wyoming as well as the predecessor Wyoming in Pennsylvania. However, the Iowa rendition was a new one for me. So I conducted a quick frequency check of “populated places” designated Wyoming in the…

  • Presidential Distances

    Twelve Mile Circle talked about birthplaces and death locations of the Presidents of the United States. Now let’s finish this off with a comparison of distances between those two points. This involved a rather simple process of dropping the lat/long coordinates for each president into a great circle distance calculator and recording the results. Then…

  • Presidential Death Locations

    After examining birthplaces of the Presidents of the United States, I shifted gears and did the same thing for the places where they died. This became a little more problematic. Historians place more attention on exact places of birth, undoubtedly because it’s a more cheerful subject. I began with the shared spreadsheet compiled in the…

  • Presidential Birthplaces

    I’m not sure why I began to think about the birthplaces of every President of the United States. Maybe this might interest people, or so I considered. However I wasn’t fooling myself — I did it for me. Theoretically I could pass through one of these areas someday in the future and I might want…

  • Not the Usual State Capital Trivia

    It was time to clear my list of unwritten articles again. While doing that I noticed several of them involved state capitals, or their capitol buildings. Well, I’m not sure what the “usual” State Capital trivia might be much less the unusual. Nonetheless, let’s consider this an article on topics that the average layperson may…

  • What the?

    It couldn’t possibly be true, a place named for Dwayne Johnson a.k.a “The Rock”, the professional wrestler and actor? This guy had more than 15 million Twitter followers! That indicated someone of immense popularity, for sure. But would someone name an entire town for him? Meanwhile, Down in Georgia No, of course not. The Rock…

  • Spit

    I’ve certainly featured spits of land on 12MC before. They’ve come up in the context of Shingle Spits and in a very specialized sense in one of my favorite geographic forms, the always wonderful tombolo. I was able to visit a particularly nice example of a spit in Homer, on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. I’ve discussed…

  • Lockport

    The website hit came from Lockport, Illinois. Well, Lockport sounded familiar, although from a different time and place than Illinois. It also seemed quite descriptive, a lock on a canal combined with a port (or perhaps a portage). Locks would be ideal places for settlements during the heyday of canal travel a century or more…

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  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…