Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Tag: Los Angeles

  • LA With a Toddler

    Los Angeles, California (June 2004) Our little guy first touched the Pacific Ocean near the Santa Monica Pier (map). Dad got to carry him right next to the water and then run back when the waves came. Nobody else was around on this quiet morning with perfect weather. All was fine with the world. Third…

  • Select City Highpoints

    I’m not much of a highpointer, and a begrudging one at best, although I maintain a kinship with those who follow this pursuit. I like the concept of highpointing more than the actual climbing of summits. That’s why I find myself occasionally visiting sites like peakbagger.com and examining things like its Peak Lists. I admit…

  • High-Flying Counties

    With all my discussions of Chicago’s Midway and O’Hare airports recently, it dawned on me that both of them fell within Cook County, Illinois. Well, technically a corner of O’Hare extended into neighboring DuPage County. But the important stuff like the terminals and most of the runways remained within Cook so I called it close…

  • How Tautological

    Previously I noted the inherent redundancy of places named River Ouse in England. The literal translation worked out to something like Water River or even River River. Similar repetitions occurred likewise wherever one language overlapped another. That happened as new settlers migrated into territory occupied and named previously by earlier cultures. Then I found a…

  • Convergence at the End

    A weird pattern emerged as I researched an article a couple of months ago and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Was it a geo-oddity or simply an oddity? Would it fit within the subject matter of Twelve Mile Circle? Would some readers find it too bizarre? Ultimately I decided I could focus…

  • 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…

  • Truckin’ Through California

    This has absolutely nothing to do with the Grateful Dead although they were indeed from California and noted for Truckin’. It is literally about trucks in California. However, feel free to listen to Truckin’ in the background if that would make you happy. So, it all started out more grandiosely. I recalled a particularly awful…

  • Would You Believe?

    Have you ever dropped into Google Street View and found terrain that just didn’t “look right,” and differed from your expectations? I think we all have stereotypical preconceptions of how a place is supposed to appear, especially if we’ve never fully explore the area in person. Below is the image that surprised me a few…

  • As the Bird Flies

    There are people who read Twelve Mile Circle from places located literally around the globe. It’s hard to believe in an era of instantaneous worldwide communication that pigeons were once considered a viable method to pass information in certain specialized instances. Often these were for specific military or governmental purposes. However, I’m not quite as…

  • No, Not That One

    I was trying to find something on Buffalo, New York. I can’t remember what it was exactly, although that’s not actually important to the discussion. However, a random search led me to another Buffalo, a town with the same name in Wyoming. I considered it rather odd. When one thinks of Buffalo as a city,…