Tag: Virginia

  • 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…

  • Land of Disco

    I came across an unusual neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina where many of the streets were named for different genres of dance. Why yes, it was a mobile home park. How did you guess? It further confirmed my theory that trailer parks have the best street names. They use labels that everyone would love to…

  • Bowling Greener

    I work from my home most days. So I have an IP Phone on my laptop that communicates with our Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) system back at our physical office. Anyway the telephone rang — well I’m not sure those are even the right words anymore. Let me start again. So the laptop opened…

  • Named for Captain Newport

    It started with a 12MC article, Upstart Eclipses Namesake and more specifically with an amusing comment from from KCJeff, “I’m willing to go out on a limb and state from my perspective that Newfoundland has surpassed Foundland!” From there I determined to find equally clever examples along the same vein. I stopped at a list…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Longest Routes for Smaller Areas

    The Twelve Mile Circle audience loves little puzzles. Knowing that, I thought I might try to fold a couple of related ideas that have fascinated lately into a single entry. First Dimension I looked back to one of the more popular 12MC concepts, the Longest Google Maps Routes. I published that about eighteen months ago…

  • Certainly Not Austin

    Austin is the vibrant capital city of Texas with nearly two million people in its greater metropolitan area. It features a bustling economy and a thriving music scene. Austinville in Virginia, well, it doesn’t have any of that. It’s a nondescript, unincorporated Appalachian village with only 2,500 residence in its entire zip code. Yet, as…

  • Can You Tell Me How to Get, How to Get to…

    Sunny DaySweepin’ the clouds awayOn my way to where the air is sweetCan you tell me how to get,How to get to Sesame Street So how many people in the 12MC audience remember that infectious little theme song from Sesame Street? I guess it signifies people of a certain age and location. However, variations do…

  • Webby Finds

    I can’t seem to make a dent in my list of potential Twelve Mile Circle articles. I keep writing steadily and in the process I run into several more morsels that go onto a never-ending pile. It appears I’ve created a perpetual motion machine. I’m going to do something I haven’t done in a very…