Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Four Runways – Four Miles

    I arrived in Alaska yesterday, in Anchorage specifically. I’d posted an appeal for Alaskan geo-oddities before I left and I’ve received a number of awesome recommendations from the generous readers of Twelve Mile Circle. First up was reader “Steve” who sent me an idea by email: “in Anchorage, there is a spot within four miles…

  • Because I Can

    I’m sure the novelty will wear-off before too long, but this is the first time I’ve ever flown on a WiFi-enabled airline flight. We’re presently in the vicinity of Cleveland, Ohio, at 38,000 feet on the first leg of our journey to Anchorage, Alaska. This is me and one of my little geo-oddity aficionados saying…

  • World’s Largest Exclave

    Are you familiar with the concept of a googlenope? It’s a phrase that returns no results when entered into Google. Imagine the difficulty of that achievement for just a moment. The phrase doesn’t exist anywhere on the Internet for all intents and purposes. How often does that ever happen anymore? Ironically a googlenope disappears upon…

  • A Geo-Oddity Holiday Celebration

    I faced a dilemma on the 4th of July holiday this year. I’d celebrated in style last year with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view the spectacular Washington, DC show from a rooftop balcony. How could I top that for Independence Day 2010? Well, the answer is I couldn’t. The only way I could improve upon…

  • Odd Irish Border Road

    New reader Ian, an Irish expat living in California, has an interest in border anomalies. He pointed out an instance in his native Ireland: the most direct road corridor between two points crosses an international border multiple times in the space of just a few miles. I am aware of a similar condition in the…

  • Optimization in Process

    The experiment to provide the entire content of each article to the RSS feed seems to have worked based on user feedback. I will be conducting further optimization and improvements over the weekend, too. There might be a short period of dead links, etc., as I switch some of the settings that should make this…

  • Free the Feed!

    Since I started the Twelve Mile Circle in November 2007, I’ve kept the RSS (“really simple syndication”) feed, well, really simple. I’ve used a WordPress option that truncates the feed into an abbreviated form that transmits maybe the first two or three sentences of each article. Today I’ve decided to Free the Feed and send…

  • Half-Breed Tract

    My hobbies sometimes run together. That happened again as I searched an 1896 land ownership map for Wabasha County, Minnesota. There I hoped to find the footprints of a peripheral ancestor. I knew the Nineteenth Century property ownership existed, in fact I’d visited the site in person. However, I’d never seen this particular vintage map…

  • Great White North(ish)

    I came across another wonderful map as I reviewed the Dead Tree Media over the weekend. The City of Toronto bought a full-page advertisement hoping to entice tourists from the northeast United States to cross the border into Canada for a weekend or a few days. They presented several lighthearted graphics designed to attract the…

  • 100th Meridian Initiative

    The meridian line 100° west of Greenwich, England, often called simply the 100th Meridian, divides roughly the eastern side of North America from the west. This happens both geographically and culturally. So it cuts directly through the Great Plains in the United States. It goes down the middle of North and South Dakota, through Nebraska,…

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…