Fun_People Archive
20 Feb
Committee Report: Why the chicken crossed the road?

Date: Mon, 20 Feb 95 13:27:34 PST
From: Peter Langston <psl>
To: Fun_People
Subject: Committee Report: Why the chicken crossed the road?

Forwarded-by: bostic@CS.Berkeley.EDU (Keith Bostic)
Forwarded-by: dab@berserkly.cray.com (David Borman)
Forwarded-by: SENHORC@aol.com
From: guta@indiana.edu (GUTA DAVIS)

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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 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 Friedrich 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. 

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? 

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. 

© 1995 Peter Langston