Category: Government

  • Time Zones in Greenland

    It’s been awhile since I thought about Time Zones. However recently I happened to be looking at a map and I remembered the peculiarities of Greenland. I did scratch the surface of this a long time ago in Islands Split by Time Zones. Now I wanted to revisit Greenland in more detail because it offered…

  • Switching Sides

    First, a disclaimer. Twelve Mile Circle deals with geo-oddities, not politics. It doesn’t take sides. However, the timing of this post fell closest to the Presidential Inauguration and I thought it might be acceptable to poke a toe just up to the line in a nonpartisan fashion. Reader “Joe” sent me an idea, as he…

  • No, It’s Not There

    A number of years ago, Twelve Mile Circle featured ten county seats in North Carolina with the same name as a different county. The concept continued to fascinate me ever since even as I doubted I’d find anything quite so remarkable. Places kept making it onto my mental list over the years so I decided…

  • Boone Scraps

    Daniel Boone became a legend even during his own lifetime. He blazed a trail through the Cumberland Gap, opening lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains to settlement. Then he served as a military officer on the frontier during the Revolutionary War. He even became a state legislator. Boone kept pushing farther west throughout his life, always…

  • Michigan, Part 6 (Parting Shots)

    I wrote several articles about my Michigan trip and I still had a pile of ideas I hadn’t touched yet. They didn’t fall into common themes so I lumped all those leftover scraps together to finish the series. I hope everyone enjoyed — or at least tolerated — my ramblings from the latest journey. We’ll…

  • Last Stand

    While I researched By George, I came across the escape route used by John Wilkes Booth in the immediate aftermath of the Abraham Lincoln assassination. Every student in the United States likely learned all about the assassination multiple times starting from elementary school and every year thereafter. Fewer probably knew much about the attempted escape.…

  • New England, Part 4 (A Little History Too)

    New England, with some of the earliest colonies in a place that would later become the United States, harbored hundreds of years of history. The people there also appreciated those ties to the past. Most of my previous trips through the region hugged the coast. I relished an opportunity to wander inland to places less…

  • And So

    I’ve paid close attention to country names during my many years of combing through 12MC access logs. Naturally I’ve looked for patterns and trends. I’m not sure what drew my particular attention to the names of nations containing the conjunction AND. It was probably one of those days when multiple instances appeared by chance. I…

  • Capitol: Behind the Scenes Tour

    I’ve lived in the Washington, DC area my entire life and it’s not very often that I get to see something in the city completely new. On Saturday the Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon series made its annual stop in town. As part of that it offered a private tour of the Capitol building as a…

  • My Speech

    On Wednesday evening I had the pleasure of presenting a speech about the Washington, DC Boundary Stones to the Stone Bridge Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Ashburn, Virginia. Since this was a group based in Northern Virginia, I placed a special emphasis on those markers on the Virginia side of the…