Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • What State U

    I mentioned the University of Idaho in a tangential comment on Résumé Bait and Switch. I focused on its location in Moscow, the city in Idaho not the one in Russia. However, I noticed an additional feature I didn’t discuss at the time. The western edge of the university ran amazingly close to the state…

  • Confluence of Confluences

    I began to consider confluences while pondering the Confluence Brewing Company during my recent Geo-BREWities exercise. Maybe I should credit Google Map’s auto-completion function for the suggestion after I typed the brewery name into an address bar. It noted that at least one town of Confluence existed. A quick check of the Geographic Names Information…

  • Geo-BREWities

    My interests collide every once in awhile. I’ve mentioned my unnatural compulsion to visit breweries several times before. So, an overlap shouldn’t come as a surprise to regular readers. This time, an industry publication mentioned a beer dinner where they paired courses with beverages from Oxbow Beer in Maine. A brewery named for an oxbow…

  • Land of Disco

    I came across an unusual neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina where many of the streets were named for different genres of dance. Why yes, it was a mobile home park. How did you guess? It further confirmed my theory that trailer parks have the best street names. They use labels that everyone would love to…

  • Bowls

    All that talk of bowling greens in the previous article increased my curiosity about the sport of bowls (or lawn bowls) in general. It’s similar to a family of Continental lawn bowling games including Bocce and Pétanque. Essentially, it spread wherever the British Empire extended. I’m not sure why I didn’t discover Bowls a couple…

  • Bowling Greener

    I work from my home most days. So I have an IP Phone on my laptop that communicates with our Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) system back at our physical office. Anyway the telephone rang — well I’m not sure those are even the right words anymore. Let me start again. So the laptop opened…

  • Mutual Ownership Defense Housing

    My reference to Audubon Park, New Jersey in For More Birds revealed an historic experiment in middle class public housing. In that instance the earlier residents of Audubon voted the newly-arrived shipyard workers out of their borough. So in response, those displaced residents created a separate Audubon Park borough. In the meantime, that anecdote revealed…

  • For More Birds

    I kicked-up a lot of material as I researched Audubon, Iowa in the recent For the Birds. Originally I’d hope to feature several Audubon towns in the United States — and I do believe they are found only in the United States — and was completely overwhelmed by wonderful delights in rural Iowa. Today I…

  • For the Birds

    While researching family history recently I came across several distantly related individuals who were born and married in the town of Audubon, Iowa, a place that is also the seat of government for a county of the same name. I wondered, as I combed through archival records, whether they commemorated famed 19th Century naturalist, ornithologist,…

  • Named for Captain Newport

    It started with a 12MC article, Upstart Eclipses Namesake and more specifically with an amusing comment from from KCJeff, “I’m willing to go out on a limb and state from my perspective that Newfoundland has surpassed Foundland!” From there I determined to find equally clever examples along the same vein. I stopped at a list…

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…