Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Big Zero

    I noticed something I hadn’t seen before as I gazed upon a map of the Canada – United States border. Well, maybe I’d noticed it before although it must not have registered at the time if that’s the case. What? You don’t stare at maps of the border? It’s one of my fixations. I’ve learned…

  • Capitals on Edge

    An interesting query came onto the site the other day. I hadn’t really thought about it previously so I decided to give it some thought and figure it. The essence of the question centered on the number of national capitals abutting international borders. It’s a situation where one hopes the nation has good relations with…

  • Locomotive Engineer for a Day

    All children want to be a locomotive engineer at one point in their childhood. Or maybe that was just me? It’s one of those exciting jobs like astronaut or fireman or race car driver. So I had an opportunity to reach back to my childhood dreams recently. I got as close as humanly possible to…

  • Bridge Between Wisconsin and Michigan

    My favorite inspiration, random Internet queries falling from the sky onto the Twelve Mile Circle via search engines, struck again recently. This time our anonymous explorer wanted to find more information about a bridge from Wisconsin to Michigan. The natural reflex would be to pull out a map… … and say to oneself, a bridge…

  • Capitals Aligned

    A query landed on Twelve Mile Circle from a search engine as they often do. Our anonymous visitor was curious about “capital cities interstate.” It took me a little while to figure out what he really wanted to know. I believe he was trying to find the small number of U.S. state capital cities that…

  • New Sweden

    The New Sweden colony first made an appearance in Twelve Mile Circle a few weeks ago. Back then I spoke of an ancient trust, on Burlington Island in the Delaware River. Swedes don’t get much attention for their colonial history in North America. The narrative generally focuses upon English, Spanish and French interests. Sometimes Dutch…

  • Prime Meridian Through Spain

    I noticed a query dropped upon the Twelve Mile Circle from one of the search engines. It was a fairly straight-forward request for information, as far as those things go. My anonymous visitor wanted to know about the “Madrid prime meridian line” Do we sense a problem? Where Does the Prime Meridian Go? The knee-jerk…

  • Abandoned Canals in Canada

    Generally I know exactly how I come up with each topic I hand-pick for Twelve Mile Circle articles. That’s not the case here. I don’t recall the exact sequence of steps that led to abandoned canals in Canada. Well, I understand the Canadian part. I figured it would be a smaller universe. Also it’s been…

  • Slices of Belgium

    Immigration and the fingerprints it leaves behind sometimes finds its way to Twelve Mile Circle as a topic of conversation. The legacy remains even after a successful assimilation and disbursement of the original population. I’m curious particularly about the smallest populations of settlers in new lands — and it might be difficult to get more…

  • Odds and Ends 5

    It’s been a long time since I’ve posted an “Odds and Ends” compilation. That’s where I combine lots of minor yet noteworthy topics that don’t provide enough material to stand on their own into one completely disjointed article. Frankly a lot of these miscellaneous topics have been going onto my social media sites lately so…

Latest Comments

  2. Hi Mr. Howder — Just going from memory, I recall that your “rule” for counting a nation/state/county is “if I’m…

  5. Does anyone have actual music to the song – Tanaha ,Timpson. Bobo and Blair ?? It was recorded by Tex…