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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