Tag: Fairfax

  • Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

    Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center; Fairfax County, Virginia, USA (January 2007) The Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center provides extra room for much of their extensive aircraft and spacecraft that cannot fit into their location on the National Mall in Washington, DC. The center sits about 25 miles west of the city on the grounds of Washington-Dulles International Airport…

  • More Oddities from Independent Cities, Part 2

    Virginia’s independent cities continued to offer their peculiar geographic secrets. The earlier part of this series explored tendrils and quadripoints. However, other strange features hid within their twisted layouts. I turned my attention to enclaves and pinches next. Those unusual features probably came from heated negotiations between cities and counties during drawn-out annexation hearings. In…

  • 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…

  • Lucky 7 & the Ghost Kid

    It all started with an innocent set of queries captured by my web stats. They seemed to follow a common theme somewhat like “strange boundary five points ma. conn.”[1] The only border anomaly between Massachusetts and Connecticut that I knew anything about was the Southwick Jog, which I featured back in October. Seven is More…