Fun:Massachusetts

The middle section of New England.

Men with firearms! Wicked awesome!

Massachusetts, also known as "Taxachusetts," is a Commonwealth in the northeastern United States. Massachusetts was one of the original thirteen British colonies to escape tyranny and cheap tea via the American Revolution. It was also the first state in the Union to make slavery illegal.

Massachusetts is home to the myth of the Pilgrims, who in 1620 formed the first permanent English-speaking colony in the New World, unless you learned about Jamestown, which was founded in 1607. That colony was known as Provincetown, but when they learned that it was naught but a vile spit-of-land peninsula with no fresh water and rampant disease, they hopped back on their boat and sailed across Massachusetts Bay to the mainland to find a better place to park themselves. Plymouth, the new home of the Pilgrims, got a fancy rock, its own holiday special every November, and later, a nuclear reactor. Jamestown got malaria.

It is one of the few states that has as its capital a city that people can remember (Boston), and was the first to legalize full marriage rights for homosexual couples. It used to really really hate whales, but these days is pretty pro-environment.

Many wingnuts, especially freepers and dittoheads (often one and the same), like to borrow Massachusetts revolutionary icons such as Paul Revere and the Minutemen (something that some Massachusetts liberals find extremely offensive), while decrying modern Massachusetts liberals and occasionally wishing to have Massachusetts thrown out of the Union. Of course, to the ancestors of the freepers and dittoheads, Paul Revere and the Minutemen were hot-headed Massachusetts radicals, which goes to show you that certain things never change.

It is also home to the Boston Red Sox, who won the 1903, 1912, 1915, 1916, 1918, 2004, 2007, 2013, and 2018 "World" Series Championships.

Cultural touchstones

• Gerrymandering, named after governor Elbridge Gerry, when a gerrymandered district bore a resemblance to a hideous salamander. Note the hard G in the name.
• Mitt Romney
• "I will remember Massachusetts" - Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb. It was their first UK No.1 and was the second record played on BBC Radio 1.
• "I love that dirty water - oh, Boston, you're my home" - The Standells, a band from Los Angeles
• "Charlie on the MTA" - The Kingston Trio.
• "This is Boston, not L.A." - punk rock compilation from the early 80's, and also a song by hardcore Boston punk band The Freeze.
• The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University.
• Boston University is pretty good.
• Got featured in the game Fallout 4; the game was extremely accurate on how modern Massachusetts operates.
• Notable musical legends: Boston, The Cars, James Taylor, Aerosmith (although really from New Hampshire), Tracy Chapman, Arthur Fiedler, The Pixies, Til Tuesday, Dropkick Murphys.
• (Boston) baked beans.
• (Boston) creme pie, which isn't a pie but a cake.
• The (Boston) creme donut, based on the pie cake.
• The (Boston) Strangler.
• (Cape) Cod.
• John F. Kennedy and clan.
• Leonard Bernstein.
• The "Big Dig" central artery depression project. (Ironically, though constantly criticized around the country as a black hole for federal highway funds, Massachusetts is still a net contributor to the federal treasury, unlike, say, Arkansas... *wink*)
• Cheers, a TV show based on the Bull and Finch pub in Boston.
• Some guy assaulting a black man with a U.S. flag during the school busing crisis.
• A St. Patrick's parade, which uses public streets, but succeeded in banning gay Irish people.
• Home of the first uncovered priest child sexual abuse scandals.
• Four major professional sports franchises: the Red Sox, Bruins, Celtics, and the New England Patriots.
• Marriage.
• WGBH, along with KQED and WNET, one of the 800lb gorillas of public television (and radio) and home base for Julia Child and several other great PBS shows.
• Zoom! (an old children's television show).
• Cranberries (the fruit, not the band).
• (Boston) tea parties.
• Paul Revere, Lexington, Concord, etc., etc., among much other boring historical stuff that is good for tourism.
• Tanglewood (for you middle-class cultural types)
• "Don't blame me, I'm from Massachusetts!"—a popular bumper sticker after the 1972 Presidential election. George McGovern carried only Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.; everyone else fell for that crook Nixon.
• The Crow's Nest in Gloucester, notorious hangout for intrepid longline fisherman types.
• The Free Software Foundation, a subversive Communist organization, is rumored to be based in Massachusetts. Decent upstanding Americans must be protected from this menace to free enterprise, apple pie, God, and Microsoft.
• Plymouth Rock, which had to be walled off because dumb tourists kept chipping pieces off of it.
• A real peculiah accent. (Note: if you pahk the cah in Hahvahd Yahd, you'll get towed and/or arrested. If you ask a local about pahking the cah in Hahvahd Yahd, you'll get punched in the face. And don't ask if we really say "Cuber" or "Havanner".)
• From the city of Springfield: the internal combustion engine, the sport of basketball, Indian Motorcycle, Doctor Seuss, Kurt Russell, and Timothy Leary.
• From the city of Worcester: Dr. Robert Goddard, father of modern rocketry_{Say that five times fast, it's fun.} and Harvey Ball, the originator of the round yellow smiley face. Also trainloads of barbed wire in the 19th century.
• From the city of Leominster: the popular pink flamingo lawn ornament.
• From the town of Whitman: the chocolate chip cookie.
• The headquarters of The Satanic Temple are in Salem. Massachusetts is also the location of Satan's Kingdom.

Parts of Massachusetts that are not Boston

• Cape Cod
• Apple trees (i.e. everything from I-495 to the New York state line)
• Providence, Rhode Island (well, we gotta spend our thong-dollaz somewhere (warning, NSFW), right?)
• Nothing is spelled right. Glosstah is spelled Gloucester, Wistah is spelled Worcester, Hayvril is spelled Haverhill, Ammerst is spelled Amherst or ZooMass, Wooburn is spelled Woburn, "Sandy Drunk Tank" is spelled "Cape Cod", etc.
• Three towns have, at various times, been "Warren, Massachusetts". The original is now Warren, Rhode Island, which changed hands a few times before the MA-RI border was set, and is named for a British naval hero. The second is what is now Warren, Maine, named for a Revolutionary War hero. The current one was originally called Western, but had to change its name in the 1830s because (despite being nowhere near each other) their mail kept getting confused with Weston, Massachusetts; since imagination was the last thing on anyone's mind, it too is named for the Revolutionary War hero.

Other things

• Michael Dukakis
• John Kerry
• Salem witch trials
• Vermin Supreme
• Elizabeth Warren

Gallery

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  Boston

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  The Salem Witch Museum

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  A beach at Cape Cod

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  Aerial view of Nantucket

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  Cave where Metacom (aka King Philip) is said to have hidden in King Philip's War.

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  The Great Dome at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at Cambridge

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  The Paul Revere House in Boston

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  Hartwall Tavern in Lexington, the site of one of the first skirmishes in the American Revolution

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  Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau spent two years living in a hut

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  Memorial Hall at Harvard University