Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Improbable Connections

    What do the following three entities all have in common?: An obscure Union general from the American Civil War A well-known advertising icon A poisonous weed Improbably, a single tenuous thread actually connects each of these items. I imagine that it’s nearly impossible to associate these widely varied topics unless one stumbles upon the answer…

  • New Highpoint for the Netherlands

    My brief vacation in Vermont over the weekend must have distracted me. Somehow I completely missed the news about the dissolution of the Netherlands Antilles on October 10, 2010. So it took an email message from loyal reader Greg to bring its true significance to my attention. I’m not referring to the dissolution of the…

  • Autumn Weekend in Vermont

    My wife and I took the kids on a roadtrip, a brief vacation over the Columbus Day holiday. We drove up to Vermont and remained there for a few days in the crisp autumn weather. We experienced rolling countryside, amazing Fall foliage and natural beauty in abundance. I’ll be sure to post some of those…

  • Rock Bands with Geographic Names

    The idea started, as it often does, with a random search engine query recorded in my web logs. A member of the public wanted to know something about an alternative rock band that she followed. It didn’t matter who she was or where she lived. She asked and I indulged. Bethany Curve The band was…

  • The Misplaced County Seat

    We’ve had lots of talk recently about inconveniently located state capitals and misaligned county seats. We’ve mined that thread for about all it’s worth so this is the last one for awhile, I promise. However, while I was conducting that research I came across an instance where the county seat is completely misplaced, and yet…

  • Nobody Wants to Visit Vinalhaven?

    I purposely feature somewhat obscure sites on the Twelve Mile Circle. Thus, my visitors tend to fall into two categories: Those who consider themselves connoisseurs of geo-oddities. Those who visit a single time because a search engine told them they should come here. Predictability I’ve become pretty adept at watching the news cycles. Often I…

  • Bakersfield: A Better California Capital?

    We had a lot of fun and some great comments during the discussion of state capitals most inconvenient to the residents of the states’ largest cities. I mentioned that I’d found the U.S. Census Bureau’s list of Population Centers by State from the year 2000 census. Naturally I took the last two questions from the…

  • Google Street View Embedded Image Problems

    NOTE: Seems to be fixed as of October 8, 2010 I noticed that the embedded Google Street View image on my Antarctica post was terribly blurry last week when I created it. I thought perhaps I’d made an error when I copied-and-pasted the code from Google Maps into the page. Usually the images look sharp…

  • Worst State Capital Location

    Loyal Reader “Greg” read my recent article about whether the county seat of Benton Co., Washington should move because the center of population shifted overwhelmingly to the east. Greg said, “To go up an order of subdivision, I wonder what US state has the smallest capital city by population compared to (a) the state as…

  • Street View Comes to Antarctica

    If you didn’t catch it yet on the Google Lat Long Blog, you may be surprised to learn that Google Street View has now arrived in Antarctica. Now, truth be told, the coverage isn’t extensive. It can be found only on one tiny corner of a place called Half Moon Island. Some may argue, “well…

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…