Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • 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…

  • Named Like a Whole Other Country

    What if I said that I could drive from Atlanta to Detroit, or Cleveland to Santa Fe, or Miami to Memphis in an hour and a half? So how about driving from Jacksonville to Buffalo in an hour? No, I didn’t say fly, I said drive. My apologies in advance to the international audience that…

  • DeKalb

    DeKalb felt like such an odd choice for a relatively common place name in the United States. I’d seen it a number of times in various widely-distributed locations over the years. I’d pondered its pronunciation which generally seemed to sound like dee-KAB with a silent L. So, naturally I wondered about its origin. It didn’t…

  • Giant Artichoke

    I spent a few summers in Monterey, California when I was a kid. We’d land at the airport in San Francisco and drive south, cutting across the mouth of the agriculturally-oriented Salinas Valley before heading down towards the Monterey Peninsula. Oftentimes we’d stop in Castroville along the way for a special treat. The Route Through…

Latest Comments

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

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

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