Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Denver’s Freaky Appendage

    Take a look at the shape of Denver, Colorado. You’ll notice an unusual appendage branching out from its northeast corner. Denver represents one of those infrequent hybrid situations where a city and a county combine to form a single entity within a common border. As a consequence, sometimes Denver acts like a city and sometimes…

  • Twelve Mile Mormons

    I get a lot of search engine queries that include the phrase, “Twelve Mile” within them. Really, that’s not so odd. One should expect that with a blog called Twelve Mile Circle. The number of places designated Twelve Mile something-or-another that turn up in these queries amazes me. Sometimes I even feature them on these…

  • Welcome to Utopia

    I don’t always understand how blog topics develop in my mind. This time curiosity led me to wonder if anyone had ever been bold enough to name a town Utopia. I never guessed someone would publish a book during the same week focusing on the same place, but I’ll get to that later. Life is…

  • Memorial Day 2010

    It’s Memorial Day, the unofficial start of the summer, but let’s not forget its greater purpose. I get an unusual audio reminder of this every year where I live. It starts building Friday evening, slowly at first as the distinctive sound of a few Harley Davidson motorcycle engines announce their presence in the neighborhood. It’s…

  • Border Pirates

    I’d always thought of piracy as a 17th Century anachronism. Then things got weird off the coast of Somalia a few years ago. Even so I considered it a distant condition borne of a failed state two oceans away. Recent reports of North American pirates have simply bewildered me. I never imagined it existed outside…

  • Playing Both Sides of the Street

    Dinosaur that I am, I still get a print copy of the newspaper each morning. We’ve laughed about that before. However, it’s an old-school habit I’ll likely not break until the publisher itself gives up on the media. I’m no Luddite and I’ve left behind a huge digital wake as I’ve cruised the Intertubes. Nonetheless…

  • Mob Rule

    One dictionary defines mob rule as a government by violent gangs, or by the masses. Another provides a wonderful synonym, Ochlocracy, a middle French word derived from the ancient Greek; which various other sources define as power from the multitude or crowd. Either way it seems a strangely deviant name for a website devoted to…

  • One Percent of Greenland Lives in a Single Building

    [UPDATE: Block P was torn down in 2012] I received the July 2010 print edition of National Geographic in the mail over the weekend. It had an interesting article on Greenland as it struggles with the effects of global warming. Naturally it includes all the usual excellent photography, maps and narrative that one would expect…

  • What Crosses an Airport Runway?

    The world of geo-oddities extends even to airport runways, and I’ve uncovered several curiosities over the past several days. The areas served by airports don’t always confine themselves to neat, tidy spaces. Oftentimes transportation resources represent a cooperative spirit between neighbors as they band together to meet a common need. Sometimes it’s just the opposite,…

  • Potpourri

    The virtual file folder is bulging at the seams but none of the topics I’ve collected for today are large enough to merit a standalone article. There should be something for just about everyone here today, something old, something new, something borrowed, something stupid. Haines Shoe House Wouldn’t you visit the Haines Shoe House if…

Latest Comments

  1. That was its original range before people spread it all around. Now it’s in lots of different places, including Oklahoma.

  2. I think that range needs to be expanded greatly. I’m in the Oklahoma City area and those are fairly prevalent…

  3. The law in the 1800s when most of the countries was being broke down into smaller one stated that you…

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