Tag: California
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Presidential Distances
Twelve Mile Circle talked about birthplaces and death locations of the Presidents of the United States. Now let’s finish this off with a comparison of distances between those two points. This involved a rather simple process of dropping the lat/long coordinates for each president into a great circle distance calculator and recording the results. Then…
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Presidential Death Locations
After examining birthplaces of the Presidents of the United States, I shifted gears and did the same thing for the places where they died. This became a little more problematic. Historians place more attention on exact places of birth, undoubtedly because it’s a more cheerful subject. I began with the shared spreadsheet compiled in the…
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Pre-Nazi Swastika Architectural Details
I traveled into the Twelve Mile Circle — the Delaware geo-oddity that inspired the name for this site — while visiting with some dear friends last weekend. In Wilmington, at Rodney Square specifically, I happened to glance up. There I noticed the wonderful Egyptian Revival architectural details on the Wilmington Public Library. My earlier Egyptian…
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Label Me Elmo
I’ll display Elmo one final time, just like in Counterintuitive Saints, even though this article will have absolutely nothing to do with Sesame Street. Why? Because that’s what 12MC wants to do at the moment. How often does one get to feature Elmo? I should probably recap some other salient points from the earlier article…
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Railroads Torment Colfax
I mentioned Colfax, Louisiana in “Just the -fax, Ma’am.” Something rang in my mind with a sense familiarity. Where had I heard of the town’s namesake, Schuyler Colfax before? I combed through the 12MC archive and discovered he’d made an appearance in a different context. One of our readers, John Deeth first mentioned him. Then…
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Kiloanomaly
What does one call a thousand geo-oddities? Ultimately I decided to use the metric prefix “Kilo,” although kilogeooddity and kilooddity both looked clunky with all of those extra vowels. Ultimately I coined the phrase kiloanomaly, equating to units of a thousand objects combining to form singular anomalies. It almost sounded like a Hawaiian word. I…
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Odds and Ends 11
The day I dreaded finally arrived. I was defaulted to the new version of Google Maps yesterday. I wasn’t favorably impressed when I first reviewed it last May. Also, I always understood that the version I’ve used since the creation of Twelve Mile Circle would go away eventually. Sooner-or-later I was going to have to…
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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…
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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…
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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…