Tag: Washington DC
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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…
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I Spy… the Street View Guy
Thank you for indulging me while I turned 12MC into a travelogue for a couple of weeks and then took a brief hiatus after I returned. Your patience will be rewarded. I’m rejuvenated now, and it’s time for more geo-oddity goodness. I like looking behind the scenes, poking behind public façades. That’s why I was…
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Who Loves 12MC in the United States?
Who loves the Twelve Mile Circle website the most in the United States? No surprise this time. It’s Washington, DC I examined the subset of 12MC visitors arriving on the website from the United States and compared it to state populations in order to derive per capita ratios. Yes, we all understand that the District…
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We Interrupt our Regularly Scheduled Programming
Those 12MC readers expecting to see the results of Mexican foreshadowing will have to wait a little longer. It’s been a rather wild ride in the Washington, DC area over the last couple of days. The thermometer hit 104° Fahrenheit (40° c.) on Friday afternoon. That not only shattered a temperature extreme for the date,…
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All Ways – Every Cardinal Direction
I put a little throwaway comment at the tail-end of my recent All Ways South article. There I demonstrated that someone could travel due south from Missouri into each of its eight neighboring states from at least one point along their shared borders. As I thought about it I noted, “Come to think of it,…
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Space Shuttle Discovery Flyover
We had a moment of excitement this morning when the Space Shuttle “Discovery” set atop a modified 747 jet airline flew right past my office window. Please excuse the low-quality photograph. I had only the camera on my mobile phone at the time and this was the best I could manage. Seeing it live with…
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Visiting the Library
I attended a work-related meeting this morning. It was pretty typical, nothing special, and probably like a thousand other meetings you or I have ever experienced in our lifetimes. This one ended a bit differently though. It took place at an office deep within the Madison Building of the Library of Congress. So our host…
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A Secret Revealed
Don’t you hate misleading headlines? I’m not really revealing a secret because it hides in plain sight. The information was publicly available as long as one knew where to search for it. I’m talking about a so-called “secret” Interstate highway route recently outed by the District Department of Transportation in Washington, DC. Unsigned Interstates There…
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Disestablished National Parks
Last summer 12MC reader “Scott” provided me with a boatload of National Park trivia. I continue to mine that for article suggestions. With that, I’m going pursue an angle that might be little known, or maybe just to me. One often thinks of everything associated with National Parks as perpetual. After all, their goals include…
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A Precious Tip
The Washington Monument has been in the news quite a lot lately. Experts continue to examine damage resulting from the 5.8 magnitude earthquake that struck on August 23, 2011. The thought of people rappelling down narrow masonry walls for hundreds of feet searching for cracks seems daunting. Just watch this video from the Associated Press:…