It's Not a T Ball, It's a T Party!

Friday is the 232nd anniversary of one of the precursors to the American Revolution, namely the American Revolution Pre-sales Event! I mean, the Boston Tea Party. As every schoolchild knows, the English put a tax on the tea, which made the tea painful to drink (you have to know your Bugs Bunny for that one, otherwise duck, you daffyless one, you). So the pre-Americans, led by Samuel Adams, Brewer-Patriot-Mad Marketing Genius™ who knew that by eliminating the tea he could get more colonists to drink his beer, snuck onto the English ships and dumped the tea into Boston Harbor, which remains polluted to this day. Samuel Adams was not an environmentalist. Many of Adams’ compatriots, boiling with rage over the steep tax, disguised themselves as Native Americans when dunking the tea, and later pointed towards real Native Americans’ directions when the British came a-calling all steamed about the incident and looking for someone to bag for the crime. The Native Americans didn’t even bother to RSVP for Thanksgiving from 1774-81, and you can’t blame them.

As punishment the British passed the Intolerable Acts, and that’s was their name for them. Perhaps the most severe punishment was the “if you don’t want our tea you can’t have any” clause, which led the rebellious town to be called Bos-on until after the Revolu-ionary War, which is hard to say even with a Bos-on accent. Luckily the colony’s name had two t’s, and therefore still got to keep one, although it led to area first-graders failing many a spelling quiz.