Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Tag: Montana

  • Virginia Silver and Gold

    Living in the Commonwealth for so many years, I guess it presupposes I’ll notice Virginia mentioned in out-of-context situations. Such was the case with Virginia City, Montana which I saw while researching presidential counties. It served as the seat of local government in Madison County, which derived its name from James Madison, the fourth U.S.…

  • Last Presidential Counties

    Reader Steve Spivey contacted Twelve Mile Circle and floated an idea about U.S. counties named for presidents. He’d traveled through Taylor County in Georgia and recalled a Taylor County in Florida. Could they be related? Well yes, they bore the name of the 12th President of the United States, Zachary Taylor. That led him to…

  • County Divided

    Look to the far northwestern corner of North Dakota, right up next to Canada and Montana. There sits a county with a curious name, Divide (map). It appeared somewhat rectangular like many other counties on the sparsely-populated Great Plains. Few natural features could take the place of arbitrary straight lines in this emptiness. I’d encountered…

  • Streets Named After…

    We’ve all seen lists created from Google’s unusual auto-search recommendations. I noticed a few entertaining results as I looked for Streets Named After… well, I forget what I was searching for exactly because I was so enthralled by the false positives. Some were mundane. I expected streets named after celebrities, trees, birds, presidents and such,…

  • Boomerang

    The trails and breadcrumbs left behind by random one-time electronic visitors sometimes remind me of interesting things I’ve discussed previously and forgotten. Witness the recent query “boomerang” that led one anonymous reader to Fraser Island in Australia, the world’s largest sand island, and its amazing perched dune lakes. As I noted when I drafted the…

  • Extreme Differences of Extremes

    I was encouraged to see that I wasn’t the only person fascinated by weather extremes in So Hot, So Cold. Reader “zxo” had been thinking along similar lines a few months ago and created a series of related maps. One of those compared the differences between the highest and lowest temperatures recorded in each state.…

  • Longest Distance – Simplest Directions

    It’s Sunday, a day to relax, so I thought I’d dispense with an article that required actual research. Instead I’ll focus on something that might exercise a different part of the brain. It’s kind-of silly and pointless although it offered an opportunity for plenty of 12MC audience participation. I wondered, as I drove to my…

  • No Names and Nameless

    The article on Public Streets seemed generate more than the usual amount of interest and lots of great comments, as well as a hint of familiarity. Input from loyal reader David Overton sent me down an interesting tangent. He mentioned No Name Street, which he believed might be “another contender for ‘laziest street name’”. He…

  • Most Remote Chinese Restaurants in North America

    I wonder if I’ve observed a genuine phenomenon or if I’m falling into a confirmation bias trap. Everywhere I travel, and I meander through extremely rural areas as a matter of preference, I notice Chinese restaurants. This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned this peculiarity. I posted Not Fusion, CONfusion a couple of years ago.…

  • Room to Grow

    I got a wake-up call when I went into Google Analytics and took a look at the volume of Twelve Mile Circle readers by metropolitan area. That’s not a tab I normally examine. I’m much more interested in the state and town totals. I was taken aback because it suggested that there were a handful…