Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Tag: Idaho

  • Rise and Fall of Idahome

    Interesting things pop-up unexpectedly while I search completely unrelated topics. I searched every instance of a town with a state name, a laborious manual process undertaken for Geographic Matryoshka with US States. Dutifully, I entered each name into the Geographical Names Information System (GNIS) one-by-one and tallied the results. My search produced towns called Idaho…

  • Bogus

    The word “bogus” had a murky history. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it may have dated back as far as 1827, used in Ohio as a slang term for a counterfeiter’s apparatus. Somehow it became the name of a machine used to manufacture fake coins. Then bogus became counterfeit or fake in a more…

  • Not the City

    I examined a stack of family files online and I learned that a distant relative lived in Houston, Texas. I’ve traced numerous family members back through there so it didn’t surprise me. However the records didn’t make sense as I read through them. Geographic identifiers seemed unfamiliar and out of place. Then I slowly realized…

  • Going Postal, Part 2

    As I mentioned in Part 1, the first installment dealt with physical post offices and this one will focus on methods of postal delivery. Both featured examples drawn primarily from the United States Postal Service’s “fun facts” page. Mule Pack animals would seem to be an antiquated method of mail delivery. Certainly horses, mules or…

  • Farthest Inland Port

    I’ve discussed the port at Duluth, Minnesota (map) before and even created a travel page for it. I was particularly fascinated with the bit of trivia that Duluth was a significant seaport even though it was located 2,342 miles (3,770 kilometres) from its eventual outlet to the Atlantic Ocean. The Duluth Seaway Port Authority described…

  • Three American Moscows

    I noticed an interesting aside on a Wikipedia entry for Moscow, Idaho while I examined background information about the University of Idaho for the recent What State U article: “It was reported by early settlers that five men in the area met to choose a proper name for the town, but could not come to…

  • 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…

  • Highest Religious Affiliation

    I’ve been spending a little time on the Religion Census 2010 website. It includes a wealth of maps and numerical tables which I’m sure to draw upon for future articles. But a few data extremes came to the forefront of my mind immediately as I leafed through some of the reports. First, don’t confuse this…

  • But What’s the Meridian?

    The definition of “meridian” sounds straight-forward enough. There are some ancillary definitions relating to greatest moments, highest achievements and such, plus one dealing with acupuncture. However, the one roughly analogous to longitude interests 12MC the most. From Dictionary.com: me·rid·i·an…(1.) Geography. (a.) a great circle of the earth passing through the poles and any given point…

  • Mountainous Claims

    I noticed a recent record in the website logs that geolocated to Mountain View, California. That’s hardly a unique occurrence. I’ve had plenty of readers from Mountain View in the past. The only difference is that I happened to wonder whether Mountain View actually had a mountain view this time. I don’t know why. That…