Twelve Mile Circle

  • My Speech

    On Wednesday evening I had the pleasure of presenting a speech about the Washington, DC Boundary Stones to the Stone Bridge Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Ashburn, Virginia. Since this was a group based in Northern Virginia, I placed a special emphasis on those markers on the Virginia side of the…

  • Sawtooth Elsewhere

    A sawtooth may not exist in Rhode Island. Nonetheless, I found plenty of others sawtooths (sawteeth?) elsewhere throughout the English-speaking world. That provided a wonderful opportunity to continue on a theme. Additionally it offered a chance to choose advantageous locations. By that I meant I decided to fill empty spots on the Complete Index map…

  • Sawtooth, Rhode Island

    Twelve Mile Circle received a handful of mysterious search queries focusing on the word “sawtooth” recently. One specifically referenced a location called Sawtooth Point, Rhode Island. I assumed they all derived from a common origin. Coincidentally or not, they landed on the same day from the same metropolitan area. One shouldn’t get too alarmed. Usage…

  • Minor League

    Twelve Mile Circle examined piles of sports teams while researching Other State Nickname Thingies. Generally I stuck with university teams although professional basketball’s Golden State Warriors became the best example. Of course I gazed at other sports too. Then I fell into the weirdness that could only be described as the names of minor league…

  • Other State Nickname Thingies

    Towards the end of 2015 I posted State Nickname Streets. As expected by the title, it offered a compendium of at least one street named in each state for its official nickname. I supposed it must have stuck in my subconscious because the notion returned. This time, however, I fixated on a several different sets…

  • 2016 Travel Plans

    A new year dawned on Twelve Mile Circle as I turned my eye towards another batch of travel adventures. Plans began to fall into place. They won’t approach the stratospheric heights of a very ambitious 2015 travel season although they’ll still be substantive from my perspective. As always, I like to post my general plans…

  • Naviduct

    Twelve Mile Circle decided to stick with the aqueduct theme once again after the recent discussion of England’s Barton Swing Aqueduct. There were other structures, equally fascinating in their own distinct ways. Some were large, some were unusual, and some offered elements of both. Many of those innovative structures seemed to concentrate in western Europe,…

  • Barton Swinging

    England underwent an extensive Canal Age in the mid Eighteenth Century, lasting for longer than a century. Waterways provided an inexpensive means to move goods across a nation. This, in turn, helping to spark the country’s rapid transformation during the Industrial Revolution. Canals offered remarkable improvements over rutted, muddy overland routes and provided the best…

  • Interstate Highway Counties

    I requested an additional account on the Mob Rule county counting website recently. I’d been planning a couple of trips for 2016. This including one focused primarily on adding new counties to my lifetime tally in an obscure geographic corner of Appalachia. So I’d been using this spare account to calculate “what-if” scenarios. Naturally, I…

  • Select African Superlatives

    I thought I’d lump another set of somewhat related items together as I continued to cull the enormous backlog of possible Twelve Mile Circle topics. However, they didn’t have much in common except that they all involved continental Africa. Two involved geographical observations and the other two related to geological oddities. All of them piqued…


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…

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