Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Odd Reality

My web access logs started sizzling with viewers on my Point Roberts – Stranded by an International Border page. People seem to love this entry so it doesn’t surprise me to register at least a few hits each day. However it mushroomed to Crazy Level recently, and all with unique IP addresses. I can’t find any referrals from any of the popular websites so that’s not driving the traffic. Rather they all seems to be coming from various search engines, and all independently. Very odd.

Navigational Beacons at Point Roberts. Photo by howderfamily.com; (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Navigational Beacons at Point Roberts

So this morning I drank my coffee and quickly perused the news online before starting my busy day, as I do every morning. I darn near spit out my coffee when I stumbled across the true reason. I’m not generally one to follow the tabloids but Point Roberts doesn’t ordinarily make it into the tabloids either. Nonetheless, the answer led there.

Down the Rabbit Hole We Go

Allegedly some guy who stars in TV Reality Shows such as the critically-acclaimed “Megan Wants a Millionaire” and the highly-esteemed “I Love Money 3” — you know real high-brow intellectual stuff — murdered his model girlfriend. Then he chopped off her fingers and removed her teeth to hinder her identification. Investigators could only identify her by her breast implants. More precisely, they used the serial numbers on her breast implants.(1) I’m not making this up!.

Anyway, the guy high-tails it up to Blaine, Washington, near the Canadian Border. There, he, steals a boat, and sails it to… um, drum roll please… Point Roberts. Then he simply walks across the border and escapes into Canada.

When Good Geo-Oddities go Bad

I don’t want to make light of the tragedy, for indeed we can only call this a tragedy. Nonetheless, it resulted in piles upon piles of hits on my website. Viewers apparently expressed a great thirsting for more information about Point Roberts. Perhaps this will bring out the inner geo-geek in one or two of them and spark a greater curiosity.(2)

Frankly, I’m amazed to discover this level of intersection between aficionados of tabloid journalism and a predisposition towards geo-anomalous curiosity. I’ll take it. I’m just happy to finally discover the reason for the mysterious rise in traffic on my site.

Don’t worry I have a real article in the hopper for tomorrow: totally geo-geeky with a huge heaping of historical background on the side. It practically guarantees that my new readers will run screaming from the site. The words “breast implant” will not appear.

12MC Loves Footnotes!

(1) Breast implants have serial numbers?… (Twelve Mile Circle adds that little piece of knowledge to his collection and realizes there’s a reason why he’s called the “Master of Useless Trivia”).

(2)Translation – my wife’s running blog gets a zillion times more viewers than mine and it would be nice to get one or two more subscribers so I won’t be quite so embarrassed whenever she’s throwing her stats around. She calls Twelve Mile Circle the most boring things she’s ever read, with our mutual friends nodding furiously in agreement. Maybe it’s the footnotes? I’ve not seen too many other blogs with footnotes.

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Comments

6 responses to “Odd Reality”

  1. Greg Avatar
    Greg

    Your footnote comment immediately reminded me of this: http://blag.xkcd.com/2009/03/27/a-brief-pair-of-notes/. As long as you don’t do that, you’re fine. And I, for one, consider your blog to be one of the most interesting blogs I’ve come across, for any topic.

    Reply
    1. Twelve Mile Circle Avatar
      Twelve Mile Circle

      Oh, I’ve been known to go a little overboard with footnotes before. Fortunately I’m able to temper that enthusiasm most of the time.

      Reply
  2. Matthew Avatar
    Matthew

    I can relate to your experience. Little Diomede Island, which I “discovered” years ago on my own after poring through a map of Alaska, had an international date line anomaly that I blogged about several months ago when I was starting a little series on geoeccentricity that was basically the same kind of thing as Twelve Mile Circle. The island’s proximity to Russia was also interesting, but then everybody discovered the island after Sarah Palin mentioned that she could see Russia from Alaskan land. I didn’t get quite the spike in e-traffic afterwards but I’m sure many more people know of the island now after Palin’s reference to it. I usually interpret “boring” non-pejoratively as “person with underdeveloped geo-weirdness sense”. 🙂

    Reply
  3. Steve_CTMQ Avatar
    Steve_CTMQ

    FWIW, the mere act of running for running’s sake is perhaps the most boring activity one could pursue. (I’m comfortable saying this here, because I said as much to your wife in person!)

    READING about running for running’s sake? Hey man, unless they’re running talking about how their breast implant serial numbers happen to match up with quirky area codes, lat-long intersections or shortest interstate highway numbers… then I’m not interested.

    (I kid, I kid!)

    Reply
    1. Twelve Mile Circle Avatar
      Twelve Mile Circle

      My wife’s blog got a comment recently from a woman runner who said she likes to get drunk and swim naked. I thought that was pretty laudable — made a reader out of me! But for the record, I don’t want to see that comment from anyone on the Twelve Mile Circle. 😉

      Reply
  4. Craig Avatar
    Craig

    Boring?! Oh well…. à chacun son goût.

    Myself, I just back from a crossword tournament, so what do I know from boring? 🙂

    Reply

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