Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

Plato: For the greater good.

Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.

Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken
which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear,
for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian
virtue?  In such a manner is the princely chicken's dominion maintained.

Hippocrates: Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas.

Jacques Derrida: Any number of contending discourses may be discovered within
the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is equally
valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because structuralism is
DEAD, DAMMIT, DEAD!

Thomas de Torquemada: Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I'll find out.

Timothy Leary: Because that's the only kind of trip the Establishment would let 
it take.

Douglas Adams: Forty-two.

Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also 
across you.

Oliver North: National Security was at stake.

B.F. Skinner: Because the external influences which had pervaded its sensorium
from birth had caused it to develop in such a fashion that it would tend to
cross roads, even while believing these actions to be of its own free will.

Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that
individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore
synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being.

Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the
chicken found it necessary to cross the road.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The possibility of "crossing" was encoded into the
objects "chicken" and "road," and circumstances came into being which caused
the actualization of this potential occurrence.

Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the
chicken depends upon your frame of reference.

Aristotle: To actualize its potential.

Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.

Howard Cosell: It may very well have been one of the most astonishing events
to grace the annals of history.  An historic, unprecedented avian biped with
the temerity to attempt such an herculean achievement formerly relegated to
homo sapien pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurrence.

Salvador Dali: The Fish.

Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.

Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.

Epicurus: For fun.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.

Johann Friedrich von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.

Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.  Alone.

Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on,
but it was moving very fast.

Schrodinger: Chicken?  Chicken!?  Where's my cat?

David Hume: Out of custom and habit.

Saddam Hussein: This was an unprovoked act of rebellion and we were quite
justified in dropping 50 tons of nerve gas on it.

Jack Nicholson: 'Cause it (censored) wanted to.  That's the (censored) reason.

Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?

Frank Perdue: I breed the finest chicken I know how, and it crosses the road
as part of a vigorous fitness program to raise the leanest, plumpest birds
anywhere.  Besides, I was chasing it with this axe at the time.

Ronald Reagan: I don't recall.

John Sununu: The Air Force was only too happy to provide the transportation,
so quite understandably the chicken availed himself of the opportunity.

The Sphinx: You tell me.

Mr. T: If you saw me coming you'd cross the road too!

Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately ... and suck all the marrow out of 
life.

Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

Molly Yard: It was a hen!

Zeno of Elea: To prove it could never reach the other side.


From Ross_Decker@ehssmtp.lbl.gov Fri Apr 21 15:00:03 1995

            WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD?


          A chicken at rest remains at rest; a chicken
          in motion remains in motion.
                  --Sir Isaac Newton

          I'm sorry, Ollie. I left the hen-house door open.
                  --Stan Laurel

          To boldly go where no hen has gone before.
                  -- Capt. James Tiberius Kirk

          The ideal chicken must ideally cross the ideal road.
          Therefore, imperfect chickens in this world
          cross imperfect roads, imperfectly.
                  --Plato

          She was driven by the lash of economic necessity.
                  --Karl Marx

          It is the essense of chickens to cross the road.
                  --Aristotle

          Those who cluck do not know.
          Those who know do not cluck.
                  --Lao Tse

          To see what's out there.
                  -- Capt. Jean Luc Picard

          It was a national security matter.
                  -- Col. Oliver North

          Oh, never mind that chicken. She's from Barcelona.
                  -- Basil Fawlty

          Because it's there.
                  --Sir Edmund Hilary

          The lions still roam the barranca
          And a hen there is always alone.
                  --The Kingston Trio

          The telephone pole suggested a phallic symbol
          and like all female creatures she wanted to be dominated.
                  -- Sigmund Freud

          It was not merely that the chicken crossed the road, Watson,
          but that the three Russian midgets and the Italian oboe player
          did not also cross.
                  --Sherlock Holmes

          She was a victim of the Illuminati One World conspiracy.
                  -- Rev. Pat Robertson

          This chicken story seems merely more gaga New Age
          silliness at first, but may contain something more
          sinister. No reputable scientists has ever reported
          a chicken crossing a road. Alleged "close encounters
          with such chickens are claimed by ignorant and
          suggestible people only. Farmers queried all report large
          fences around their hen-yards, to prevent chickens
          from escaping. One recalls similar mass delusions
          in Nazi Germany before Hitler.
                  --Martin Gardner.

          She was a victim of the Jewish conspiracy.
                  -- Adolph Hitler

          O thin men of Haddam
          Why seek so eagerly the golden bird?
          Do you not see the chicken
          On the dirt road you walk?
                  --Wallace Stevens

          She was a victim of the English Gnostic Drug Cartel conspiracy.
                  --Lyndon LaRouche

          I sent a hen into the astral plane
          To learn our future, and man's luck,
          And by and by the bird returned to me
          But all she's say was "Cluck, cluck,cluck!"
                  --Omar Khayyam

          She was a victim of the male conspiracy.
                  -- Gloria Steinem

          She was dazed and disoriented after the extra-terrestrials
          abducted and genetically altered her.
                  --Budd Hopkins

          This Department recalls the distasteful incident
          of the Chainsaw Subliminals -- World falling -- Photo falling --
          Breakthrough in hen yard -- Towers open fire --
          Goddam floating whorehouse -- Death is the navigator --
          A few may get through to the Gate in Time --
                  --William S. Burroughs

          She was brainwashed by the liberal feminazi media.
                  --Rush Limbaugh

          I will consider my hen, Brigit,
          For she is a servant of the livinge dawn
          to praise the Sun in her song,
          Retiring at dusk like an honest worker,
          Making by Alchemy from seeds an egg
          For she fears Death and the Devil
          Known to her as Fox and  Chickenhawk;
          For she is motherly to her chicks;
          For she refutes the Atheist and Mechanic
          Choosing of her free will to cross the road!
                  --Christopher Smart

          Why, let us freely feather our brutish nests
          In this barnyard world -- like the hen i' the adage --
          Until the Ax of mortality falls on all our necks
          And we squawk and make one final futile flutter:
          Then blackest night falls on the king and commoner.
                  --Will Shakespeare

          To blow, man, to get groovy and dharma blissed-out
          in the henyard of railroad earth.
                  --Jack Kerouac

          it all depends
          on one road here
          now
          and one chicken here
          now
          in the mud
          by the wheelbarrow
                  --William Carlos Williams

          Chickens and roads were not
          Nor stars nor moon nor earth
          Until man's mind made all,
          All, of his bitterness and  mirth.
                  --William Butler Yeats

          I would prefer that my neighbors and the police
          knew nothing about that chicken,
          but it would be even better if they knew several
          things that were quite wrong.
                  --Flann O'Brien

          I saw a chicken cross the road
          But could not stop to ask
          Why she had to hurry so
          Or what the urgent task.
                  --Emily Dickenson

          Actually, we'll probably change that on rewrite.
                  --Quentin Tarantino

          To find a place to plant the other glove.
                  --F. Lee Bailey

          Give me ten minutes with that chicken and we'll find out.
                  --Tomas de Torquemada

          The question admits of  limitless answers, since
          there is no one logocentric strategy of discourse that takes
          primacy over all others.
                  -- Jacques Derrida

          This  chicken problem has many depths,
          but all of them are equally shallow.
                  -- Oscar Wilde

          Little chicken, who set thee free
          To wander here on Highway Three?
          "Oh, sir, your question's very odd;
          He is called the Lamb of God."

          Little chicken, crushed and bleeding,
          You did not see that auto speeding.
          "Oh, sir, do not sit and brood:
          God just had a Tygerish mood."
                  --William Blake

          Forty-two.
                  -- Douglas Adams

          It was her True Will to cross just that road on just that day.
                  --Aleister Crowley

          We made her an offer she couldn't refuse.
                  --Vito Corleone

          To kiss your skin, to lie with you in moonlight...
                  --Sappho

          To impose a meaning upon her accidental existence.
                  --Jean Paul Sartre

          To leave the place she knew for another place
          And to stay there for a while
          And then to move onward to a third place.
                  --T.S.Eliot

          To ask this question denies your own chicken nature.
                  --Buddha

          Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road
          crossed the chicken depends upon the inertial
          system of the observer.
                  --Albert Einstein

          It was the next step after coming down from the trees.
                  --Charles Darwin

          All hens are endowed by Nature and Nature's God
          with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of the other side.
                  --Thomas Jefferson

          When the emperor performs the rites with full reverence,
          and the court officers behave as true scholars and gentlemen,
          a hen may cross any road in the kingdom safely.
                  --Confucius

          To die. In the rain.
                  --Ernest Hemingway

          To escape the crawling horror lurking on this side of the road,
          a nameless and foetid monstrosity that cannot be conceived save
          in the dreams of madness
                  -- H.P. Lovecraft

          There was no chicken, no road, no crossing.
          There was only -- an interpretation.
                  --Friederich Nietzsche

          She was seduced by the dark side of the road.
                  -- Darth Vader

          She had beady inhuman eyes like strange black jewels
          and the kind of feathers a bird of paradise
          might envy. I knew  that if they made her a free-range chicken
          she'd grab the first opportunity and never look back.
                  --Raymond Chandler

          Mrs. Hahn, Cock's wife, flapflopped from an ova
          eggspressed (one l'ouvre, end sot)
          and charged that lewd brigade
          into any tennis sun in this faunanimal whirled.
                  --James Joyce

          Carol Christmas never knew if she had actually
          seen a chicken calmly crossing the street in New York's
          worst traffic, or if it was another nasty joke by
          that malign dwarf, Chaney. But now she was seeing
          chickens at every corner, waiting for the light to
          change. She saw them most often after coming
          out of her class on post-modern literature.
                  --Robert Anton Wilson

          I don't remember.
                  --Ronald Wilson Reagan

          I will not use a chicken as a frisbee.
          I will not use a chicken as a frisbee.
          I will not use a chicken as a frisbee.
          I will not use
                  --Bart Simpson

          Nostradamus predicted chicken/Bigfoot horror!
                  --Weekly World News

          The chicken choose to exercize individual initiative
          and not wait for a government-funded street-light program.
                  --Newt Gingrich

          Uncle Ike saw her first: just an ordinary chicken, he thought
          for a moment, a chicken picking here and pecking there, gradually
          working her way across the road toward the lawn; but then he
          felt the fingers tighten on his arm and looked up, astounded,
          to see him, the Colonel, eyes lit with a new fire, face
          aglow like a saint seeing a vision: and then it was destiny, a
          thing pre-ordained, a fatality, for the Colonel did not
          reveal even to him, Uncle Ike, the secret ingredients,
          not the names of the herbs and not even the number of
          them (some would say he used as many as twenty, and
          others insisted there was butJone magic herb that created
          that special flavor) and so the secret of the crust remained,
          a hermetic mystery, an arcanum implacable and inpenetrable,
          locked in the private places of the Colonel's soul: and yet
          the vision was real, a true moment of Fate; for the franchises
          sold almost as fast as they could slaughter and gut the
          stock, and they spread across the country, across the
          civilized world, making the Colonel not just a millionaire
          but a billionaire, and Uncle Ike saw it all, knew it all,
          from the beginning to the day when the initials KFC were
          to be seen in every city, every town, every hamlet large enough
          to own two mules and an Assembly of God church:
          until now, standing in the franchise in Jefferson,
          Yoknapatawpha County, where Flem Snopes, the bank
          president, hawked and coughed and spat on the floor,
          then hoisted his britches, country style, and said
          to the waitress, "Make it extra crispy, please."
                  --William Faulkner

          I ate her liver. With fava beans.
          And a brandied cranberry sauce.
                  --Hannibal Lecter, M.D.


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