Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Tag: Colorado

  • Comparison Nicknames

    I enjoyed reading Wikipedia’s List of U.S. State Nicknames recently. My amusement didn’t come from the familiar nicknames I already knew, rather it derived from the nicknames I never knew existed. Alabama was the Lizard State? Really? Did anyone else know that? Then I noticed that several of the states featured nicknames that compared them…

  • Center of the Nation, Part 2 (States and Counties)

    Transporting a participant through a grueling six day, six state race series created a huge benefit for a geo-geek such as myself, the inherent need to cover a lot of territory. I’d driven through parts of the target area previously on a cross-country trip many years ago. I’d completed the typical tourist trek through the…

  • Western North Carolina, Part 5 (Exclamation Point)

    Twelve Mile Circle faced a bit of a geographic dilemma in western North Carolina. An issue began to appear towards the end of the week. Indeed, I might risk a doughnut hole county if I wasn’t careful. That condition would occur if I counted a bunch of contiguous counties and then left one in the…

  • Going Postal, Part 1

    I alluded to postal ZIP codes in the recent Zip Lines and I’ll carry that theme through the next couple of articles. I’d stumbled upon the United States Postal Service’s Fun Facts. Someday maybe I’ll explore what exactly makes a fact “fun” although for now I think I’ll simply steal liberally from that page and…

  • Me and What Army

    The format today will be similar to the “Odds and Ends” series, a veritable pu pu platter of tasty tidbits. However, the primary difference will be that inspiration came almost entirely from the far corners of the 12MC army. I still have several other reader contributions waiting in the wings too. Please be patient if…

  • Officially Tilde

    I received a message recently from a 12MC reader in Cañon City, Colorado. I couldn’t help noticing the tilde, the little squiggle over the letter “ñ.” That of course was punctuation used in Spanish, not English, so it caught my eye. Very few places in the United States include diacritical marks recognized officially by the…

  • Remnants

    What does one call it when a bunch of fabric gets cut-up when making an item of clothing, and then there are a bunch of leftovers? What are those residual scraps? Remnants? That’s what I was left to work with today, a bunch of little snippets that didn’t quite make it into previous articles. They’ve…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Goin’ Down to Garland

    I stumbled upon an old thread on the Straight Dope message boards discussing the naming of streets. Responsible parties included the usual cast of characters such as developers, county governments, planning commissions, city councils, working-level bureaucrats, and the like. One contributor on that message board mentioned that: “Several years ago, I was working with a…