Category: Canada

  • My Ridiculous Historic Parallel

    My interest in history is probably as great as my interest in geography. So naturally that’s a theme I’ve woven into Twelve Mile Circle quite regularly. Keeping that in mind, I’ve grown ever-excited as events commemorating the 150th anniversary of the U.S. Civil War approach. Activities will escalate rapidly on April 12, 2011 with the…

  • Random Canada

    Many months ago I toyed with an idea that I called “Throw the Dart”. That’s where I’d go into Google Street View, drop the cursor onto some random part of the world and then try to create an article from thin air. It worked pretty well in October 2009 when I hit a spot outside…

  • Octagons

    I’ve been going through old digital photographs, labeling and geotagging them so they’ll be easier to find in my collection. I have an appreciation for unique architecture in addition to my fascination with odd geography. Thus, I’ve noticed several photos that feature structures of unusual shape and design The octagon ranks high amongst them. Apparently…

  • Not Fusion, CONfusion

    I remember reading through my mother’s old High School yearbook years ago when I was a child. I recall only one detail that has stuck with me ever since. The yearbook had a disproportionate number of advertisements sponsored by furniture stores that doubled as funeral parlors. I didn’t pay attention to the well-wishes of her…

  • Exclamatory Towns!

    I intended to focus on places that have punctuation included as part of their official names. I found two basic categories: those with an apostrophe denoting a possessive; and well, that’s about it. Undeterred, I searched further and eventually found three towns with exclamation points. Excited in Westward Ho! The name of a town in…

  • St. John’s at Long Last

    I made an offer to the kind readers of Twelve Mile Circle back in September 2010. I said I’d be glad to explore and present geo-oddities for any location based on user suggestions. So I took this as a personal challenge and an opportunity to investigate areas that may have escaped my attention previously. “Katy”…

  • Islands Split by Time Zones

    I captured the query of an anonymous reader. He or she wanted to know whether there were an islands split by time zones. I’d never pondered that before but I came up with a couple of quick examples off the top of my head. That didn’t satisfy me so I turned to a worldwide time…

  • Great White North(ish)

    I came across another wonderful map as I reviewed the Dead Tree Media over the weekend. The City of Toronto bought a full-page advertisement hoping to entice tourists from the northeast United States to cross the border into Canada for a weekend or a few days. They presented several lighthearted graphics designed to attract the…

  • Kenora, So Far Away

    Many months ago, in what seems like a lifetime ago in the world of Twelve Mile Circle, I focused on rural Southwestern Virginia. I demonstrated through a simple mapping design that one distant corner of the state was closer to the capitals of eight other states than to its own capital of Richmond. This was…

  • Mount Pearl Mystery

    Why do I get such a disproportional number of visitors from Mount Pearl? It’s just a random small city in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada. So is there something on Twelve Mile Circle that resonates with its 25,000 residents? Or does a small number of amazingly dedicated 12MC fans happen to live there? I am sure…