Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • The Article That Nobody Will Ever See

    Of course you are not a “nobody”. I mean it in a statistical sense. Sure, you and I both stopped here today although we might be the only ones; visitors totals will still come mighty close to zero. Who’s going to read these words I’ve posted on Christmas Eve? Twelve Mile Circle has a diverse…

  • Three Letter Oddities

    I mentioned OGG as the three-letter airport code for Kahului Airport on the Hawaiian island of Maui in the Middling article for no greater significance than I found it amusing. And it sounded like something a caveman might say. A little Intertubes sleuthing led me to an easy explanation at Airport ABCs, an article reprinted…

  • Warp Drive

    Somehow Warp Drive slipped past my attention in the recent Drive Me Crazy article, a collection of several creatively-named streets such as Line Drive for baseball stadiums, Disk Drive for an information technology company, and Doctor Drive which became a study in redundancy. Reader Michael Hollinger rightly noted my omission of Warp Drive in a…

  • Middling

    Some of the recent articles included places in the New York City area, an odd coincidence. I also happened to spot an interesting name on Long Island during the process, a place called Middle Island. It appeared to be pretty close to the middle of Long Island, which indeed is a long island. I drove…

  • Ampersand

    One of the sources I consulted for Follow the Letter referenced a town with an alphabetical street grid with one extra street. They named the street Ampersand instead of beginning a new sequence, although technically Ampersand did begin with an A as long as it wasn’t explicitly rendered as “&” on the street sign. I’ll…

  • Follow the Letter

    Streets and roads appear frequently on Twelve Mile Circle and so do patterns. We can combine both as observed with any logical street grid featuring either numbers or letters. I’ll focus on the latter. Fortunately lists of alphabetical patterns appeared all over the Intertubes. So I sorted through a multitude of possibilities and selected a…

  • Résumé Bait and Switch

    New reader “Thomas” sent an email to 12MC concerning an institution of higher learning seemingly out of place geographically. The University of California has a number of affiliated campuses, although none of them are located in Pennsylvania. Yet, oddly there’s a California University of Pennsylvania. As always, there was a twist to the situation as…

  • New Arrivals

    There are very few places in the world that have never sent a visitor to Twelve Mile Circle in the several years since I started the site. Nonetheless I check my access statistics for any new arrivals along with all the rest of my borderline obsessive-compulsive reader behavior examinations. I conducted the last comprehensive check…

  • 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…

  • Fire or Fir

    If visitors to the Twelve Mile Circle come from a town with an odd name they’re automatically fodder for an article. I’ll dig until I find something memorable just on principle. Additionally, I’ll note that a single letter, the scant difference between Fire and Fir in this instance, could alter meanings considerably. Maybe I should…

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…