Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • The Impossible 5K

    I was watching the Weather Channel on Sunday morning — yes that’s something I do for fun, thus proving I’m a geek on so many different levels — and they cut to a story on an event called “The Impossible 5K.” My wife is a runner and I pick up a lot of new counties…

  • Third Anniversary

    Has it really been three years already? Indeed, I started Twelve Mile Circle in November 2007 with a vague notion that it would be about “geo-oddities.” I didn’t know how long I would keep it going. Blog lifespans are notoriously short. I recall personal concerns and doubts that I might not find enough topics, that…

  • Why THIS Spot?

    What does this mean to you? n 45°55.145′ w 090°05.011′ That’s what the query said when I spotted it in my blog access logs. What an oddly precise item to drop into a search engine. The visitor came to Twelve Mile Circle by following a Google link, one of only five in existence. You know…

  • Tunnel Under the Border

    Tunnels under the border aren’t anything new but they’re usually about smuggling. I can think of several examples off the top of my head including tunnels between Mexico and the USA for drugs, Egypt and Gaza for basic goods, and the former East and West Berlin for people. Those are all interesting and I don’t…

  • W Towns Outside Boston

    Reader “HH” brought an interesting situation outside of Boston, Massachusetts, to my attention this week. He discovered this many years ago and has been wondering about it every since. On the surface it doesn’t seem like much, just a ride along U.S. Route 20. It has a bit of historic importance in its own right,…

  • Think of the Children

    Regular readers should feel free to skip today’s article. It’s intended to help out a very specific segment of one-time visitors. It’s time for another installment of “Help the Kids with their Homework.”™ The question I keep seeing likely derives from a mathematics assignment, but it also has a nice geography twist. It’s been all-the-rage…

  • Revisiting the Swap

    It’s not every day that I get an opportunity for a do-over. I was in Williamsburg, Virginia during the early part of this week. It’s so tantalizingly close to The Swap that I featured a few weeks ago. I travel to Williamsburg about once a year on business and I have mixed feelings about the…

  • County with (Another) State’s Name

    It makes great intuitive sense for a state to include a component county with the same name. Imagine living in Oklahoma City. Not only do the residents live in a city named Oklahoma, they also live in a county and a state named Oklahoma. That’s not imaginative, in fact it’s rather boring. Ditto for Arkansas,…

  • Islands Split by Time Zones

    I captured the query of an anonymous reader. He or she wanted to know whether there were an islands split by time zones. I’d never pondered that before but I came up with a couple of quick examples off the top of my head. That didn’t satisfy me so I turned to a worldwide time…

  • Longdon England. Yes with a G.

    So what happens when someone wants a map of London and accidentally fat-fingers the keyboard and spells it “Longdon?” Google Maps still processes the request but it doesn’t return one of the most significant cities in the world as one originally intended. The results are considerably more humble. Worcestershire Even more amazingly, there are at…

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…