Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Just as Enigmatic

    Why? Because. Why Not? I dunno. It’s a puzzle. It’s a riddle. I unearthed an Enigma and I discovered a Paradox. Then I decided to have a little fun with a few more place names along a similar vein. Many of them defied explanation and remained enigmatic. They can still be enjoyed simply for their…

  • Georgia’s Enigma

    A couple of earlier topics conglomerated conceptually in my mind to create my recent fascination with the U.S. state of Georgia’s Enigma. I discovered Enigma — it’s an actual town in Georgia that has about 1,200 residents — as I researched Shaped Like it Sounds (Street Edition). Enigma contained an Ell Street, which indeed resembled…

  • From Camp to Town

    When I mentioned The Bloodshot Eye recently I hadn’t realized that I’d stumbled upon a “thing”. I’d encountered a long history of annual Camp Meetings held by the Methodist Church. Back then I featured the unusual circle-and-spokes streets of Pitman Grove, New Jersey (map). Of course that included the tiny Victorian-era cottages that lined them.…

  • Upstart Eclipses Namesake

    When I think of “New” places I tend to fuse together the full placenames mentally into a single phrase and begin to overlook the separate elements. I don’t forget completely that earlier entities inspired newer ones, although I mostly overlook the original namesake within the larger string. For example, if I considered Orléans in France…

  • When Planners Get Bored

    I’ve been collecting a bunch of oddly shaped and unusually themed neighborhoods and didn’t know what to do with them. They didn’t have any similarity amongst them, even appearing in completely different parts of the world, although I wondered if perhaps I could force them into a set anyway. The first notion that came to…

  • Menacing Island

    I spied an island full of deviants. What else could explain a cluster of geographic features with names such as Freak, Lunatic, Menace, Germ, Moron, Filthy and Maniac? I plotted my discoveries along with several other bizarre placenames I’d encountered within a single map. This included the only spot in the United States named, and…

  • Boomerang

    The trails and breadcrumbs left behind by random one-time electronic visitors sometimes remind me of interesting things I’ve discussed previously and forgotten. Witness the recent query “boomerang” that led one anonymous reader to Fraser Island in Australia, the world’s largest sand island, and its amazing perched dune lakes. As I noted when I drafted the…

  • Countdown to Midnight

    Today I following the normal progression of articles as they post on Twelve Mile Circle. I felt somewhat obligated to publish an article even though it fell on New Years Eve. Yes, I can’t stop even on New Years Eve. Readers in Europe and places farther east won’t see this until 2014. They’ve already flipped…

  • Congrats or Something

    It was like one of those mystery shopping contests where someone enters a store and suddenly confetti and balloons rain from the ceiling when the one-millionth customer crosses the threshold, and wins a big prize. Except it was four thousand. And I couldn’t provide anything valuable. Congratulations to “Peter” for posting Twelve Mile Circle’s 4000th…

  • Shaped Like it Sounds (Street Edition)

    Several months ago, right after I returned from my Dust Bowl trip and tallied my new County Counts, I noticed that one of them, Lincoln County, Colorado was sort-of shaped like the letter L. So that led to Shaped Like it Sounds, a brief collection of States, Counties and Towns that mirrored the first letter…

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  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…