Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Twelve Mile Circle

  • Drive Me Crazy

    Previous 12MC articles delved into creative and sometimes bizarre pairings of street names with suffixes. Those were explored in posts such as Order in the Court, He Went Thata Way and No Way! Way!. Enough with the Courts and Ways (curds and whey?). It’s time to drive. Line Drive Readers from international areas devoid of…

  • Municipally Owned Telephone

    Many municipalities have considered or have already started to provide broadband services to their residents directly. They intentionally bypass numerous commercial enterprises that specialize in those functions. There were more than 100 cities doing that already just in the United States alone in 2011. Control over speed and pricing offered one big reason. A desire…

  • Bostonian Confusion and I Don’t Mean Massachusetts

    I kept things vague when I discussed Boston — the Boston in Texas — in Named Like a Whole Other Country. I stopped at “the man who opened the first store in the area was W. J. Boston.” Otherwise I might have tipped my hand that I’d discovered three Texas Bostons all within about four…

  • Trap Streets

    I’ve wanted to feature Trap Streets on 12MC for the longest while. I began the initial research and started writing an opening paragraph probably a half-dozen times over the last five years. It remained on my topic list, surviving various purges in the vague hope that someday I might find an opportunity to discuss it.…

  • Odds and Ends 10

    I have an abundance of half-formed story ideas, an overflowing mailbag and a cornucopia of reader suggestions. That means it must be time once again for Odds and Ends, my recurring series of features and topics not quite large enough to fill an entire article on their own. A couple of interesting items came to…

  • Named Like a Whole Other Country

    What if I said that I could drive from Atlanta to Detroit, or Cleveland to Santa Fe, or Miami to Memphis in an hour and a half? So how about driving from Jacksonville to Buffalo in an hour? No, I didn’t say fly, I said drive. My apologies in advance to the international audience that…

  • DeKalb

    DeKalb felt like such an odd choice for a relatively common place name in the United States. I’d seen it a number of times in various widely-distributed locations over the years. I’d pondered its pronunciation which generally seemed to sound like dee-KAB with a silent L. So, naturally I wondered about its origin. It didn’t…

  • Giant Artichoke

    I spent a few summers in Monterey, California when I was a kid. We’d land at the airport in San Francisco and drive south, cutting across the mouth of the agriculturally-oriented Salinas Valley before heading down towards the Monterey Peninsula. Oftentimes we’d stop in Castroville along the way for a special treat. The Route Through…

  • City of Frogs

    I love statistical clustering. Another moment of weirdness revealed itself on my never-ending family history quest. I’ve oftentimes searched for months without finding anything beyond mundane anecdotes of routine life. However, the latest one was far better. It actually tied to geography in a concrete way so bear with me as I provide context, or…

  • Keep it Moving

    Twelve Mile Circle examined freeways and motorways with the most lanes previously. That was a measurement of potential capacity. Would those massively-wide behemoths continue to reign supreme once someone posted actual traffic volumes? That wasn’t the case except for one notable exception. Comparisons weren’t easy although Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT) seemed to be a…

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…