Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Search results for: “portmanteau”

  • Counties in California that I have Visited

    There are 58 counties in California – “The Golden State“ Also be sure to see my United States County Counting Page for the rest of the states. I have visited 25 Counties = 43.1% of Counties in California Counties visited are colored-in; counties still needing to be visited are blank. Map created using Mob Rule.…

  • Jersey Shore, Part 5 (Positive Signs)

    I have a thing for signs and I noticed that the Jersey Shore had plenty of interesting things to tell us.  They displayed a tale of my week-long visit down the coastline in words and pictures.  I didn’t intend to search for signs, nor did I have any particular plan to remember them.  They appeared…

  • Cross-Country, Part 5 (The Eastern Half)

    We actually did a lot more than collect new counties and visit zoos.  After all, we sat in a car for five days!  I needed to stop every couple of hours to stretch my legs.  Sometimes we timed our layovers to see something interesting and sometimes things had a way of finding us.  The open…

  • Murdo Mystery

    I seemed to be fixated on time lately, ever since writing the recent Time Zones in Greenland. I went through my long list of open items and found a few more timely topics. So Twelve Mile Circle could benefit from subjects of that nature while I cleared the backlog. Murdo seemed a likely candidate. Murdo…

  • That Recurring State Line

    A random Twelve Mile Circle reader became an unwitting inspiration for this article simply because of where he or she lived. The little dot within Idaho on my Google Analytics dashboard mentioned State Line. That seemed too good to be true. I’ve done plenty of articles about border towns although I’d never noticed that one…

  • Rise and Fall of Idahome

    Interesting things pop-up unexpectedly while I search completely unrelated topics. I searched every instance of a town with a state name, a laborious manual process undertaken for Geographic Matryoshka with US States. Dutifully, I entered each name into the Geographical Names Information System (GNIS) one-by-one and tallied the results. My search produced towns called Idaho…

  • More Geo-BREWities

    My geography and brewery interests collided a few months ago. The happy result produced Geo-Brewities. Apparently Google says I own that term now, a pseudo-portmanteau of geography + brewery + oddities. I don’t expect it to become part of the popular lexicon. It’s not that catchy. Developing the List I took a different approach on…

  • More Than a Game

    Sometimes a game isn’t just a game, like when it involves the championship of a beloved sport. My recent “Whole Other Country” observations created more spinoff story opportunities than I would have imagined. For instance, it led me to Buffalo, Texas, a town named for a large bovine that still roamed the prairies when a…

  • Largest Artificial Lakes

    I had some fun with artificially created geographic features lately. First I featured the largest artificial islands and then islands joined artificially to the mainland. Now, I thought, I’d flip the concept to the opposite extreme. Instead of land on water, how about water on land? What might be the largest area of terrain intentionally…

  • Triple Letter

    An unwary visitor arriving on the Twelve Mile Circle through some random search once again provided fodder for an article topic. The query forwarded by search software said: “name of the county, state and cities starts with s?” Usually this means someone is trying to complete an online geography contest or perhaps an old-school crossword…