Tag: Washington DC
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Odds and Ends 11
The day I dreaded finally arrived. I was defaulted to the new version of Google Maps yesterday. I wasn’t favorably impressed when I first reviewed it last May. Also, I always understood that the version I’ve used since the creation of Twelve Mile Circle would go away eventually. Sooner-or-later I was going to have to…
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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…
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District Bridge Sculptures
I decided to take a bit of a departure today. I’ll focus more attention on images and dive even farther into hyper-local coverage. This may interest a smaller slice of the usual 12MC audience. I took the kids to the Smithsonian’s National Zoo recently and decided to take the Memorial Bridge across the Potomac River…
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DC Brewery Trail
EDITOR’S UPDATE: THIS ARTICLE WAS WRITTEN IN 2013. THE LOCAL BEER SCENE HAS GROWN AND CHANGED CONSIDERABLY SINCE THAT TIME. How does one justify a series of brewery visits within the subject matter of a geo-oddities blog? Good question. Author’s prerogative? Precedence? Ultimately I considered it a road trip; a very short and very specialized…
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Arlington County Will Grow
I stumbled across an article in the Washington Business Journal a few days ago. They called it, Over the river: Reagan National runway to be shifted into the Potomac. This probably wouldn’t mean much to most people. The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority will adjust one of DCA’s notoriously short runways ever so slightly. That’s a…
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Odds and Ends 7
A number of items have come up recently although none large enough for a single article. It’s time to resurrect a recurring theme. The 12MC “Odds and Ends” compilation ratchets up to #7. Google Maps Treasure Map By now everyone should be aware of the April Fools layer on Google Maps yesterday. It created a…
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Odds and Ends 6
We have lots to talk about today in convenient bite-sized morsels. Time passes, familiar stories change, unexplored topics surface, and readers continue to contribute great ideas (thank you!). It’s a convenient moment to dust-off a periodic recurring theme on 12MC. I call it “Odds and Ends.” Like a bad movie spawning endless sequels, the Twelve…
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Short Distance Namesakes
Something has been bothering me since I mentioned the town of Washington, Virginia recently in Flip-Flopping. It claims title to the oldest town named for George Washington, platted by none other than George Washington himself in 1749. I noted that many call it Little Washington to differentiate it from nearby Washington, DC which dates to…
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US State Capital Surnames
We’ve waded through surnames that paired with nations and those that matched U.S. states. Now it’s time for the third and final installment of this investigation. Let’s look at surnames that match capital cities of U.S. states. A quick summary of the rules — I pulled information from Frequently Occurring Surnames from Census 2000 [link…
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Locomotive Engineer for a Day
All children want to be a locomotive engineer at one point in their childhood. Or maybe that was just me? It’s one of those exciting jobs like astronaut or fireman or race car driver. So I had an opportunity to reach back to my childhood dreams recently. I got as close as humanly possible to…