Thoreau

Armies in Henry David Thoreau's time used drums and bugles to coordinate the movements of large groups -- the sounds stood in for previously memorized drills or commands. So his different drummer comment evoked a different set of associations in readers then compared to now. It comes as somewhat of a shock to find a Thoreau MySpace page come up in response to a google search for "Thoreau January."

This blog post was originally going to ruminate on the significance of "google analytics" statistics about readership and viewers. The numbers are tiny compared to the "thousands of hits" Steve Moseley mentions. That got me musing about differences in personalities & tastes, and the next thing you know, we're looking at Henry contemplating a snowball.
I'd be remiss not to mention that many of Thoreau's works are available in the collections at Kilgore Memorial Library.