Avian flu, chickens and roads
The Avian flu contagion is starting to spread across Europe, with reports in from most countries of infected populations. At the moment there still isn't much need for alarm although the media are starting to focus a little too heavily on the issue for my liking.
The European Parliament decided yesterday to allow vaccination of poultry throughout the EU, which hopefully will prevent the mass killing of many birds. At the moment they are still confined to quarters, but within a few weeks they should be allowed out once the vaccines start working.
One of the last seen, on her daily walk, crossing the road.
Which brings me back to one of those important questions which has kept many a person occupied for quite some time...
*****
George W. Bush: We don’t really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road or not. The chicken is either with us or it is against us. There is no middle ground here.
Pat Buchanan: To steal a job from a decent, hard-working American.
Dr. Seuss: Did the chicken cross the road?
Did he cross it with a toad?
Yes, the chicken crossed the road,
But why it crossed, I’ve not been told!
Plato: For the greater good.
Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.
Al Gore: I invented the chicken. I invented the road. Therefore, the chicken crossing the road represented the application of these two different functions of government in a new, reinvented way designed to bring greater services to the American people.
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.
Noam Chomsky: The chicken didn't exactly cross the road. As of 1994, something like 99.8% of all US chickens reaching maturity that year had spent 82% of their lives in confinement.
The living conditions in most chicken coops break every international law ever written, and some, particularly the ones for chickens bound for slaughter, border on inhumane.
My point is, they had no chance to cross the road (unless you count the ride to the supermarket).
Even if one or two have crossed roads for whatever reason, most never get a chance. Of course, this is not what we are told. Instead, we see chickens happily dancing around on Sesame Street and Foster Farms commercials where chickens are not only crossing roads, but driving trucks (incidentally, Foster Farms is owned by the same people who own the Foster Freeze chain, a subsidiary of the dairy industry). Anyway, ...
(Chomsky continues for 32 pages. For the full text of his answer, contact Odonian Press)
Ralph Nader: The chicken’s habitat on the original side of the road had been polluted by unchecked industrialist greed. The chicken did not reach the unspoiled habitat on the other side of the road because it was crushed by the wheels of a gas-guzzling SUV.
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.
Rush Limbaugh: I don’t know why the chicken crossed the road, but I’ll bet it was getting a government grant to cross the road, and I’ll bet someone out there is already forming a support group to help chickens with crossing-the-road syndrome. Can you believe this? How much more of this can real Americans take? Chickens crossing the road paid for by their tax dollars, and when I say tax dollars, I’m talking about your money, money the government took from you to build roads for chickens to cross.
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.
Jerry Falwell: Because the chicken was gay! Isn’t it obvious? Can’t you people see the plain truth in front of your face? The chicken was going to the “other side.” That’s what they call it - the other side. Yes, my friends, that chicken is gay. And, if you eat that chicken, you will become gay too. I say we boycott all chickens until we sort out this abomination that the liberal media whitewashes with seemingly harmless phrases like “the other side.”
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 occurence.
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 von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.
Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.
Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.
David Hume: Out of custom and habit.
Jack Nicholson: ‘Cause it (censored) wanted to. That’s the (censored) reason.
Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?
Ronald Reagan: I forget.
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.
Chaucer: So priketh hem nature in hir corages.
Wordsworth: To wander lonely as a cloud.
The Godfather: I didn’t want its mother to see it like that.
Keats: Philosophy will clip a chicken’s wings.
Blake: To see heaven in a wild fowl.
Othello: Jealousy.
Dr Johnson: Sir, had you known the Chicken for as long as I have, you would not so readily enquire, but feel rather the Need to resist such a public Display of your own lamentable and incorrigible Ignorance.
Mrs Thatcher: This chicken’s not for turning.
Supreme Soviet: There has never been a chicken in this photograph.
Oscar Wilde: Why, indeed? One’s social engagements whilst in town ought never expose one to such barbarous inconvenience - although, perhaps, if one must cross a road, one may do far worse than to cross it as the chicken in question.
Kafka: Hardly the most urgent enquiry to make of a low-grade insurance clerk who woke up that morning as a hen.
Swift: It is, of course, inevitable that such a loathsome, filth-ridden and degraded creature as Man should assume to question the actions of one in all respects his superior.
Macbeth: To have turned back were as tedious as to go o’er.
Whitehead: Clearly, having fallen victim to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
Freud: An die andere Seite zu kommen. (Much laughter)
Hamlet: That is not the question.
Donne: It crosseth for thee.
Pope: It was mimicking my Lord Hervey.
Constable: To get a better view.
The European Parliament decided yesterday to allow vaccination of poultry throughout the EU, which hopefully will prevent the mass killing of many birds. At the moment they are still confined to quarters, but within a few weeks they should be allowed out once the vaccines start working.
One of the last seen, on her daily walk, crossing the road.
Which brings me back to one of those important questions which has kept many a person occupied for quite some time...
Why did the chicken cross the road?
George W. Bush: We don’t really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road or not. The chicken is either with us or it is against us. There is no middle ground here.
Pat Buchanan: To steal a job from a decent, hard-working American.
Dr. Seuss: Did the chicken cross the road?
Did he cross it with a toad?
Yes, the chicken crossed the road,
But why it crossed, I’ve not been told!
Plato: For the greater good.
Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.
Al Gore: I invented the chicken. I invented the road. Therefore, the chicken crossing the road represented the application of these two different functions of government in a new, reinvented way designed to bring greater services to the American people.
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.
Noam Chomsky: The chicken didn't exactly cross the road. As of 1994, something like 99.8% of all US chickens reaching maturity that year had spent 82% of their lives in confinement.
The living conditions in most chicken coops break every international law ever written, and some, particularly the ones for chickens bound for slaughter, border on inhumane.
My point is, they had no chance to cross the road (unless you count the ride to the supermarket).
Even if one or two have crossed roads for whatever reason, most never get a chance. Of course, this is not what we are told. Instead, we see chickens happily dancing around on Sesame Street and Foster Farms commercials where chickens are not only crossing roads, but driving trucks (incidentally, Foster Farms is owned by the same people who own the Foster Freeze chain, a subsidiary of the dairy industry). Anyway, ...
(Chomsky continues for 32 pages. For the full text of his answer, contact Odonian Press)
Ralph Nader: The chicken’s habitat on the original side of the road had been polluted by unchecked industrialist greed. The chicken did not reach the unspoiled habitat on the other side of the road because it was crushed by the wheels of a gas-guzzling SUV.
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.
Rush Limbaugh: I don’t know why the chicken crossed the road, but I’ll bet it was getting a government grant to cross the road, and I’ll bet someone out there is already forming a support group to help chickens with crossing-the-road syndrome. Can you believe this? How much more of this can real Americans take? Chickens crossing the road paid for by their tax dollars, and when I say tax dollars, I’m talking about your money, money the government took from you to build roads for chickens to cross.
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.
Jerry Falwell: Because the chicken was gay! Isn’t it obvious? Can’t you people see the plain truth in front of your face? The chicken was going to the “other side.” That’s what they call it - the other side. Yes, my friends, that chicken is gay. And, if you eat that chicken, you will become gay too. I say we boycott all chickens until we sort out this abomination that the liberal media whitewashes with seemingly harmless phrases like “the other side.”
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 occurence.
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 von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.
Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.
Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.
David Hume: Out of custom and habit.
Jack Nicholson: ‘Cause it (censored) wanted to. That’s the (censored) reason.
Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?
Ronald Reagan: I forget.
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.
Chaucer: So priketh hem nature in hir corages.
Wordsworth: To wander lonely as a cloud.
The Godfather: I didn’t want its mother to see it like that.
Keats: Philosophy will clip a chicken’s wings.
Blake: To see heaven in a wild fowl.
Othello: Jealousy.
Dr Johnson: Sir, had you known the Chicken for as long as I have, you would not so readily enquire, but feel rather the Need to resist such a public Display of your own lamentable and incorrigible Ignorance.
Mrs Thatcher: This chicken’s not for turning.
Supreme Soviet: There has never been a chicken in this photograph.
Oscar Wilde: Why, indeed? One’s social engagements whilst in town ought never expose one to such barbarous inconvenience - although, perhaps, if one must cross a road, one may do far worse than to cross it as the chicken in question.
Kafka: Hardly the most urgent enquiry to make of a low-grade insurance clerk who woke up that morning as a hen.
Swift: It is, of course, inevitable that such a loathsome, filth-ridden and degraded creature as Man should assume to question the actions of one in all respects his superior.
Macbeth: To have turned back were as tedious as to go o’er.
Whitehead: Clearly, having fallen victim to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
Freud: An die andere Seite zu kommen. (Much laughter)
Hamlet: That is not the question.
Donne: It crosseth for thee.
Pope: It was mimicking my Lord Hervey.
Constable: To get a better view.
5 Comments:
42 is the answer to everything :P
Yeah, but what's her Kevin Bacon number? Must be low cause eggs and bacon go together quite well. :)
Love it!
Hmmmm..I'm rethinking the whole eating chicken thing.
This post reminded me of an incredible train ride to Iasi on my first year of high school to the Latin National Olympics (In Romania, the high-school and secondary school contests pm different subjects are called Olympics). The Latin team from our town was always a closed group of its very own pride (we were good but never regarded the same way as the Maths or Informatics gang) and we spent part of that train trip reading such answers to this question - Why did the chicken cross the road? It was fun then and it is equally fun now, especially after having learned a bit about more of the names here!:D
Brilliant! :)
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