Category: History
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Things I Wonder
I maintain a long list of potential topics on a spreadsheet and currently it stretches several hundred rows. Some of my story ideas remain on the sheet for months or years. That’s because they must have been interesting enough to record but not substantial enough to create a standalone article. Let me winnow down the…
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New Counties
I had so much fun hunting through counties with the recent Google Maps boundary release that I simply kept going. Then I fixated on a set of United States counties somehow considered “New.” Well they started with the prefix New, and referenced something older. Several states included that format so I figured I’d find plenty…
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Victory: County Lines on Google Maps
The day has finally arrived. Google just added United States county lines (and more!) to its maps. I’ve been hoping for this development for the last two years. I first pushed readers to express their interest way back in February 2010. I’d mention it periodically (OK, whined), usually within the context of “wouldn’t it be…
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Radioactive
I follow the various geo-blogs on an RSS reader like many of you do. Google’s LatLong Blog announced an imagery update on January 9 as it does periodically. So I checked the list of improvements as is my normal custom. One of the towns updated with high resolution aerial imagery sparked my curiosity: Radium Springs,…
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The Pinetree Line
I’m not sure how I stumbled upon the Pinetree Line. It seemed to be a particularly descriptive term though. So I guess I tucked it away on my list of “things to ponder later.” It was a Cold War manifestation, an effort by Canada and the United States to provide an early warning system should…
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Ticklish Canada
Tedious would be the right way to describe my efforts to clean dead links from my ferry website over the holidays. Even that nasty task provided a nice side benefit. It offered an opportunity to view detailed portions of maps I’d not considered in awhile. That’s how I spotted Black Tickle as I repaired the…
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More Land than People
It’s a new year on the Twelve Mile Circle. I finished a lot of necessary maintenance behind the scenes over the last couple of weeks when nobody would be reading anything anyway, and I’m ready to start rolling-out new material. What better way to start a new day than by finishing up a bit of…
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Reflecting on 2011
I’m progressing better than I expected with my off-season website maintenance plan. It has provided an unexpected opportunity to hammer-out one final post in 2011. I’ve decided to use the downtime to reflect on accomplishments on Twelve Mile Circle during the last year. I posted 156 articles over the year — generally three per week…
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Numerical Place Names
I wondered if I could find any place names composed entirely of numbers. Thus, while communities such as Thousand Oaks and Twentynine Palms in California were interesting in a sense, they wouldn’t do for my purpose. I wanted to find places that transcended the precision of a description to reach entirely higher circles of absurdity.…
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Vennbahn
Google Street View finally arrived in Belgium. This offered an opportunity to revisit a topic that’s been sitting in my queue unaddressed for the longest time. I figured that most of us were familiar with the Belgian portion of the Vennbahn railroad line. This is the line that created several small German enclaves within Belgium…