#not thoreau

[fuckyeahthoreau]

Hey Guys. 

GUESS WHAT DAY IT IS

Happy 200th Birthday Henry

Prepare for a day* of posts.

* ”day” refers to a pre-determined number of posts in a 12 hour timespan

[fuckyeahthoreau]

Interrupting the blog maintenance to remind those of us to whom it is relevant: early voting has started today for Massachusetts. 

Please exercise your right to vote in the United States if you are able. If you have any opinion on the state of your country, I urge you to cast your vote.

[fuckyeahthoreau]

Hello Followers,

Sorry I haven’t been posting that much lately. Work has been a bit of a frenzy for me. I’ll try to get some things queued up for the near future!

In case anyone is interested, here are some pics from the Associated Press showing what my job has entailed lately:

[fuckyeahthoreau]

Handwriting Meme?

You know that thing where people send in a quote/word/phrase/name/etc. and then you write it on actual paper and post a picture of it?

If anyone wants me to write a Thoreau quote or quite frankly anything at all, I’d be happy to do that this weekend. Or alternatively if you’d like to submit a quote in your own handwriting, that’d be great too.

[fuckyeahthoreau]

Tumblr Update

Hey Followers,

Apparently tumblr staff couldn’t leave well enough alone and were messing around with things. The blog theme got completely messed up, colors were wrong, fonts were wrong, links got screwy, etc. Hopefully fuckyeahthoreau looks back to normal now that I’ve had some time to work on it a little bit and try to fix things. Please let me know if you find anything glaringly hideous.

Ugh.

[fuckyeahthoreau]

We lost one follower on Thoreau’s birthday. RUDE.

[fuckyeahthoreau]

Update

Hey Followers!

You might have noticed a bit of a lapse in the posting schedule lately, I’m terribly sorry about that and I’m going to try to get more things in the queue. 

Here’s the reason why: I have moved back to Massachusetts! After eight years living and working away from home, I have returned to Cape Cod. 

Some of you may know this already from the AMAs I’ve done, I am an archaeologist that mainly studies the history of astronomy and the astronomical-based architecture of ancient cultures. Oddly enough I now find myself working on history that’s roughly 1000 years more recent than my academic background. 

Just this past week the Whydah Pirate Museum opened in Yarmouth, MA. The Whydah was a pirate ship that sank off the coast of Cape Cod in 1717. To date it is the only authenticated pirate treasure ever found. Our museum also has a working archaeology lab where you can see us uncover more historical artifacts every day.

Henry David Thoreau witnessed the aftermath of a shipwreck off of the Cape, and the memory of the event, plus the reaction of the ruthless Cape Cod locals who were notorious for salvaging anything and everything they could from whatever washed ashore, including picking clean the bodies of the shipwrecked sailors. By Thoreau’s time, the legend of “Black Sam” Bellamy and the Whydah treasure was a famous local tale on Cape Cod. I’ve actually got some quotes from Thoreau regarding shipwrecks and Cape Cod history, which I’ll be sharing over the next few weeks.

If you have any questions for me about the museum, my archaeology work, and of course Henry David Thoreau, always feel free to send me a message.

- Marie

[fuckyeahthoreau]

Thanks to Facebook, I’ve been reminded that on this day, May 17, back in 2010, I apparently made a trip up to Walden Pond. Here’s what I had to say about it at the time:

“It cost me $37.88 more to visit Walden Pond for an afternoon than it did for Thoreau to live there for two years!”

In case you want my math involved (not taking into effect inflation, mind you):  “$61.00 to fill up my Jeep. $5 dollars for parking. Compared to the $28.12 it cost him to build a house, with a chimney, woodshed, and feed himself for two years.”