Twelve Mile Circle – An Appreciation of Unusual Places

Tag: Spain

  • Moron

    Calling someone a moron would be offensive, maybe even fighting words. It derived from Greek for stupid or foolish, and later came down through Latin with a similar meaning, then finally passed along to modern languages. I knew it retained that meaning when it came to English, certainly more widely recognized than the colloquial use…

  • Marking the Meridian

    A random one-time reader landed on Twelve Mile Circle recently. That unknown visitor sought information about the Prime Meridian, and I’ll get to the specific request in a moment. I know I’ve discussed this meridian before. However, in searching my archives and after examining the Complete Index I discovered that I’d never actually marked the…

  • Rotonda Elsewhere

    The Italian word rotonda means the same as the English word rotunda. They both derived from the Latin word rotundus meaning round. I’d tugged that etymological thread in Rotonda West. However, Rotonda West wasn’t the only Rotonda. Far from it. Many more existed although usually in Italy as one would expect, or in places where…

  • More Endorheic in Europe

    I have a mild obsession with endorheic basins. Those are magical places where water flows into them and never flows out except through evaporation. They’ve appeared several times on the pages of Twelve Mile Circle over the years. I’ve even discussed an example in Europe before, Lake Neusiedl on the border between Austria and Hungary.…

  • Highway to Park

    A park near my home sits above an interstate highway leading into Washington, DC. Here, builders tucked the roadway into a little valley leading downhill towards the Potomac River and put a concrete lid above it. Drivers on Interstate 66 enter a tunnel briefly before returning to daylight and crossing the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge into…

  • Lover’s Leap

    A photograph and a quote used on the recent Hot Springs article referenced Lover’s Leap in Hot Springs, North Carolina. Twelve Mile Circle has noticed numerous other Lovers’ Leaps over the years. So then I wondered. In all of those dozens of examples, had there ever been a verifiable case where an actual lover leapt?…

  • Head of the Class

    I thought back to my school days when a teacher would call roll alphabetically. Naturally people with surnames like Anderson would get the first call. Mine fell somewhere in the middle so I had to pay attention for a little while. Then I could daydream for the rest of the drill. However, I always felt…

  • Schwebefähre

    Twelve Mile Circle received a wonderful suggestion from loyal reader “Joshua D” probably six months ago. He mentioned the schwebefähre (“suspension ferry“) in Rendsburg, Germany. These structures went by various names in different languages including “transporter bridge” in English. They were so odd, so whimsical, so amazingly impractical that I found them difficult to comprehend,…

  • 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…

  • Separate but Tallest

    Sometime examining something from a different angle provides interesting results. Other times it provides only the previous results, just with a different angle. Today it was the latter albeit with one unrelated twist at the end. I thought about a 12MC article from 2010, New Highpoint for the Netherlands. It pointed out the interesting situation…