Category: Miscellaneous
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Nearly Nothing Named for Nixon
I joked as I wrote More Presidential County Sorting that nobody will ever name a county for disgraced former U.S. President Richard Milhous Nixon who resigned in 1974 in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. That led me to wonder, well, had anyone ever named anything for him? Maybe I was being overly harsh? Actually…
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End of the Line
Many longtime Twelve Mile Circle readers probably already guessed that this article that would come next. Immediately after a story about the beginning of the alphabet, naturally one would expect to find one about the end. It became an equally difficult task too, except for the most notable location. Take a moment to ponder this…
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Head of the Class
I thought back to my school days when a teacher would call roll alphabetically. Naturally people with surnames like Anderson would get the first call. Mine fell somewhere in the middle so I had to pay attention for a little while. Then I could daydream for the rest of the drill. However, I always felt…
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Islands and Cape, Part 4 (Random Thoughts)
There were numerous other happenings from my recent Cape Cod and Islands adventure that didn’t fit within larger themes. Some of them were unusual. Others simply recorded additions to my various lists. Still others, well, I’m not sure why I felt they were noteworthy except that they caught my attention for some inexplicable reason. My…
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Nimby Lane
Twelve Mile Circle has an international audience so I’m never sure whether a term that’s part of my lexicon translates geographically. Many readers probably know the term NIMBY. For the rest of you, and particularly the foreign-language readers, NIMBY is an acronym for “Not In My Back Yard.” As defined by Dictionary.com NIMBY is… “…used…
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Reader Mailbag 2
Every once in awhile I receive an overwhelming number of excellent finds from the Twelve Mile Circle community. Last time I called the collection “Reader Mailbag.” I simply tacked the number 2 onto that older title in a nod to my lack of creativity for the current installment. To be considered for the Reader Mailbag…
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Avoiding the Temptation
It sat there in front of me, so tempting, so wanting to be bestowed with a clickbait title on this 12MC article. I could have called it Sex Folk or maybe Folk Sex. Certainly that would have attracted some undeserved attention and a few extra eyeballs. However, for what purpose? People who come to the…
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New Difference
The recent 12MC article Small Change, Big Difference created an unusual amount of interest. One comment from reader Ross arrived embedded with a challenge: “This reminds me of a question I’ve often wondered: Which place changes the most when you add ‘New’ in front of the name? In other words: Which ‘New’ place is the…
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Cornfield
I wouldn’t quite call it a groundswell. However, more than one hundred different people searched for “cornfield” on Twelve Mile Circle over the last five years. So obviously readers want an article based on cornfields and I shall oblige. Never say that 12MC doesn’t respond to its loyal fans. I interpreted cornfield to mean Corn…
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Five Years of Searching
Twelve Mile Circle featured an article with the curious title Search for Search and Other Tales about two years ago. This effort examined a year’s worth of search queries that people entered into the website. To be clear as before, these weren’t random searches from Google or other sources, these were actual words or phrases…