Tag: Virginia
-
Named for Captain Newport
It started with a 12MC article, Upstart Eclipses Namesake and more specifically with an amusing comment from from KCJeff, “Iām willing to go out on a limb and state from my perspective that Newfoundland has surpassed Foundland!” From there I determined to find equally clever examples along the same vein. I stopped at a list…
-
Follow the Letter
Streets and roads appear frequently on Twelve Mile Circle and so do patterns. We can combine both as observed with any logical street grid featuring either numbers or letters. I’ll focus on the latter. Fortunately lists of alphabetical patterns appeared all over the Intertubes. So I sorted through a multitude of possibilities and selected a…
-
Drive Me Crazy
Previous 12MC articles delved into creative and sometimes bizarre pairings of street names with suffixes. Those were explored in posts such as Order in the Court, He Went Thata Way and No Way! Way!. Enough with the Courts and Ways (curds and whey?). It’s time to drive. Line Drive Readers from international areas devoid of…
-
Longest Routes for Smaller Areas
The Twelve Mile Circle audience loves little puzzles. Knowing that, I thought I might try to fold a couple of related ideas that have fascinated lately into a single entry. First Dimension I looked back to one of the more popular 12MC concepts, the Longest Google Maps Routes. I published that about eighteen months ago…
-
Certainly Not Austin
Austin is the vibrant capital city of Texas with nearly two million people in its greater metropolitan area. It features a bustling economy and a thriving music scene. Austinville in Virginia, well, it doesn’t have any of that. It’s a nondescript, unincorporated Appalachian village with only 2,500 residence in its entire zip code. Yet, as…
-
Can You Tell Me How to Get, How to Get to…
Sunny DaySweepin’ the clouds awayOn my way to where the air is sweetCan you tell me how to get,How to get to Sesame Street So how many people in the 12MC audience remember that infectious little theme song from Sesame Street? I guess it signifies people of a certain age and location. However, variations do…
-
Webby Finds
I can’t seem to make a dent in my list of potential Twelve Mile Circle articles. I keep writing steadily and in the process I run into several more morsels that go onto a never-ending pile. It appears I’ve created a perpetual motion machine. I’m going to do something I haven’t done in a very…
-
Colonial Colleges
I made a passing reference to the Colonial Colleges of the United States recently in King’s College Tract. There are over four thousand colleges and universities in the U.S. that award degrees today. But only nine of them — the so-called Colonial Colleges — acquired a charter before the United States gained independence. So I…
-
Plank Roads
I used to drive between Washington, DC and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, nearly every weekend for about eighteen months a number of years ago. I became very familiar with the route and every landmark placed upon it as one might imagine. One of those included an exit for Boydton Plank Road along Interstate 85 near…
-
Make a Bee Line
I noticed an historical record that mentioned a late 19th Century railroad, the Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati and Indianapolis Railway. That’s not what interested me though, it was the railroad’s nickname, the “Bee Line” What a wonderful name for a railway. I considered it a nice play on words aligning with the idiom “to make a…