Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Town of County Line

    I’m always on the lookout for odd town names. So that’s what drew my eye to a dot, the aptly named County Line, Alabama. I wish I could make a better map, however Google seems to be stripping features away from “old” Maps, and the newer version is even worse. I can’t do simple things…

  • Canada’s Pocket Desert

    Canada allegedly contains exactly one lonely desert, or maybe none at all. It depends on who you consult. They’ve also coined various names for the anomaly known colloquially as “Canada’s Pocket Desert” including Okanagan, Osoyoos and Nk’mip. Whatever the designation, it’s located adjacent to the Town of Osoyoos in southern British Columbia. So it sits…

  • Label Me Elmo

    I’ll display Elmo one final time, just like in Counterintuitive Saints, even though this article will have absolutely nothing to do with Sesame Street. Why? Because that’s what 12MC wants to do at the moment. How often does one get to feature Elmo? I should probably recap some other salient points from the earlier article…

  • Counterintuitive Saints

    I stumbled upon the history of St. George, the city in Utah. I was surprised to learn that its name had nothing to do with the Saint George I assumed it referenced. By using the title “counterintuitive saints” I meant counterintuitive to me of course. I realize some of these examples might sound completely natural…

  • Railroads Torment Colfax

    I mentioned Colfax, Louisiana in “Just the -fax, Ma’am.” Something rang in my mind with a sense familiarity. Where had I heard of the town’s namesake, Schuyler Colfax before? I combed through the 12MC archive and discovered he’d made an appearance in a different context. One of our readers, John Deeth first mentioned him. Then…

  • Abundant Agglomerated Archipelagos

    Rather than call this “More Thousand Islands” and confuse it with the purpose of my recent celebratory Kiloanomaly, I came up with a new name. Rest assured, by mentioning abundant agglomerated archipelagos, I actually meant places other than the Thousand Islands poking above the Saint Lawrence River between Canada and the United states that share…

  • Just the -fax, Ma’am

    Police sergeant Joe Friday never actually said “just the facts ma’am” on the vintage television show Dragnet, according to Snopes. Rather, the character played by Jack Webb uttered different lines. People later confused things and created the classic phrase now erroneously attributed to the show. A similar confusion surrounded the suffix “-fax” appended to surnames…

  • Kiloanomaly

    What does one call a thousand geo-oddities? Ultimately I decided to use the metric prefix “Kilo,” although kilogeooddity and kilooddity both looked clunky with all of those extra vowels. Ultimately I coined the phrase kiloanomaly, equating to units of a thousand objects combining to form singular anomalies. It almost sounded like a Hawaiian word. I…

  • Odds and Ends 11

    The day I dreaded finally arrived. I was defaulted to the new version of Google Maps yesterday. I wasn’t favorably impressed when I first reviewed it last May. Also, I always understood that the version I’ve used since the creation of Twelve Mile Circle would go away eventually. Sooner-or-later I was going to have to…

  • Gary Coleman on the Grassy Knoll

    The search engine query landed like an explosion on Twelve Mile Circle, hoping to uncover the ultimate in unlikely conspiracy theories, “Gary Coleman on the Grassy Knoll.” Yet, the article you are reading right now is the first time that Mr. Coleman ever appeared on this blog. I couldn’t remember any other occasion, and I…

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