Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Category: Island

  • TGIF

    I’ve long wanted to add Washington’s San Juan County to my county counting list and maybe someday I’ll succeed. Pondering that eventuality I began to grow increasingly curious about its only incorporated town, Friday Harbor (map). Specifically I wondered about the story behind its name. It seemed unusual to name a settlement after a day…

  • Abundant Agglomerated Archipelagos

    Rather than call this “More Thousand Islands” and confuse it with the purpose of my recent celebratory Kiloanomaly, I came up with a new name. Rest assured, by mentioning abundant agglomerated archipelagos, I actually meant places other than the Thousand Islands poking above the Saint Lawrence River between Canada and the United states that share…

  • Kiloanomaly

    What does one call a thousand geo-oddities? Ultimately I decided to use the metric prefix “Kilo,” although kilogeooddity and kilooddity both looked clunky with all of those extra vowels. Ultimately I coined the phrase kiloanomaly, equating to units of a thousand objects combining to form singular anomalies. It almost sounded like a Hawaiian word. I…

  • Just as Enigmatic

    Why? Because. Why Not? I dunno. It’s a puzzle. It’s a riddle. I unearthed an Enigma and I discovered a Paradox. Then I decided to have a little fun with a few more place names along a similar vein. Many of them defied explanation and remained enigmatic. They can still be enjoyed simply for their…

  • Menacing Island

    I spied an island full of deviants. What else could explain a cluster of geographic features with names such as Freak, Lunatic, Menace, Germ, Moron, Filthy and Maniac? I plotted my discoveries along with several other bizarre placenames I’d encountered within a single map. This included the only spot in the United States named, and…

  • New Arrivals

    There are very few places in the world that have never sent a visitor to Twelve Mile Circle in the several years since I started the site. Nonetheless I check my access statistics for any new arrivals along with all the rest of my borderline obsessive-compulsive reader behavior examinations. I conducted the last comprehensive check…

  • Separate but Tallest

    Sometime examining something from a different angle provides interesting results. Other times it provides only the previous results, just with a different angle. Today it was the latter albeit with one unrelated twist at the end. I thought about a 12MC article from 2010, New Highpoint for the Netherlands. It pointed out the interesting situation…

  • Middle of Nowhere

    I once searched for and found the Center of the Universe. Never mind that there were plenty of other claimants, I found the one true center naturally because the Intertubes confirmed it and of course that made it unquestionably true. It was much more difficult to find the middle of nowhere. First one must discover…

  • Odds and Ends 9

    I’ve collected another raft of small discoveries not nearly meaty enough to stretch into an entire article on their own. 12MC readers have also been kind enough to make me aware of some unusual situations. That must mean it’s time once again for an installment of Odds and Ends, our ongoing collection of bite-sized morsels.…

  • Completely Random

    I happened to pop onto the 12MC Clustr Map as I like to do occasionally because I’m strange like that and I enjoy watching visitor statistics in real time, and a certain placename caught my eye: Random Lake, Wisconsin. It seemed — and you knew where I’d take this — so incredibly random. “Where do…