Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Follow the Letter

    Streets and roads appear frequently on Twelve Mile Circle and so do patterns. We can combine both as observed with any logical street grid featuring either numbers or letters. I’ll focus on the latter. Fortunately lists of alphabetical patterns appeared all over the Intertubes. So I sorted through a multitude of possibilities and selected a…

  • Résumé Bait and Switch

    New reader “Thomas” sent an email to 12MC concerning an institution of higher learning seemingly out of place geographically. The University of California has a number of affiliated campuses, although none of them are located in Pennsylvania. Yet, oddly there’s a California University of Pennsylvania. As always, there was a twist to the situation as…

  • New Arrivals

    There are very few places in the world that have never sent a visitor to Twelve Mile Circle in the several years since I started the site. Nonetheless I check my access statistics for any new arrivals along with all the rest of my borderline obsessive-compulsive reader behavior examinations. I conducted the last comprehensive check…

  • More Than a Game

    Sometimes a game isn’t just a game, like when it involves the championship of a beloved sport. My recent “Whole Other Country” observations created more spinoff story opportunities than I would have imagined. For instance, it led me to Buffalo, Texas, a town named for a large bovine that still roamed the prairies when a…

  • Fire or Fir

    If visitors to the Twelve Mile Circle come from a town with an odd name they’re automatically fodder for an article. I’ll dig until I find something memorable just on principle. Additionally, I’ll note that a single letter, the scant difference between Fire and Fir in this instance, could alter meanings considerably. Maybe I should…

  • Drive Me Crazy

    Previous 12MC articles delved into creative and sometimes bizarre pairings of street names with suffixes. Those were explored in posts such as Order in the Court, He Went Thata Way and No Way! Way!. Enough with the Courts and Ways (curds and whey?). It’s time to drive. Line Drive Readers from international areas devoid of…

  • Municipally Owned Telephone

    Many municipalities have considered or have already started to provide broadband services to their residents directly. They intentionally bypass numerous commercial enterprises that specialize in those functions. There were more than 100 cities doing that already just in the United States alone in 2011. Control over speed and pricing offered one big reason. A desire…

  • Bostonian Confusion and I Don’t Mean Massachusetts

    I kept things vague when I discussed Boston — the Boston in Texas — in Named Like a Whole Other Country. I stopped at “the man who opened the first store in the area was W. J. Boston.” Otherwise I might have tipped my hand that I’d discovered three Texas Bostons all within about four…

  • Trap Streets

    I’ve wanted to feature Trap Streets on 12MC for the longest while. I began the initial research and started writing an opening paragraph probably a half-dozen times over the last five years. It remained on my topic list, surviving various purges in the vague hope that someday I might find an opportunity to discuss it.…

  • Odds and Ends 10

    I have an abundance of half-formed story ideas, an overflowing mailbag and a cornucopia of reader suggestions. That means it must be time once again for Odds and Ends, my recurring series of features and topics not quite large enough to fill an entire article on their own. A couple of interesting items came to…

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