Why did the chicken cross the road?

Chales · Guest

CBS-TV's Andy Rooney: I could have said "Didja ever wonder why it is that the chicken crossed the road, and which road it was?" But I didn't. I did ask some turkeys, however, and this is what they said...

President William Jefferson Clinton: That depends on how yuh define "road".

COBOL Programmers: 0001-CHICKEN-CROSSING.
IF NO-MORE-VEHICLES THEN
PERFORM 0010-CROSS-THE-ROAD
VARYING STEPS FROM 1 BY 1 UNTIL
ON-THE-OTHER-SIDE
ELSE
GO TO 0001-CHICKEN-CROSSING

Hillary Rodham Clinton: I don't bake cookies; I don't cook chicken. I am not a crook -- er, I am not a cook.

James Carville: Because the mean-spirited Republican majority in congress was going to cook the chicken and leave only the sun-bleached bones picked bare for the American people that they'd throw out in the street, Larry!

Ayn Rand: A chicken's first duty is to itself. And only by living for itself is it able to achieve the things which are the glory of chickenkind. Such is the nature of achievement.

A Typical Politically Correct Person: Don't blame the chicken! Society is to blame. The chicken did cross the road, but he or she was merely a victim of this racist, bigoted, sexist society. We are all to blame, for failing to provide... [blah, blah, blah -- ad nauseam]

The Channel 7 (WSVN, Miami) News Team: In a story you will see only on WSVN, a young homeless chicken crosses the road in Citron Beach for the very first time... The orphaned chicken is hit by a speeding car and is thrown sky high... Authorities are still trying to pick up the pieces. At the family's request, the chicken's remains will be used to make chicken soup for the orphaned chicks...
This just in... Is OJ's golf game getting worse, now that he's in the custody battle of his life?

Tom Leykis: I cannot bee-LEEVE that women are SO shocked to hear that the reason the chicken crossed the road is because the rooster was trying to get into her pants!

Rush Limbaugh: It was having more fun than a chicken should be allowed to have, listening to the Rush Limbaugh program on the EIB network and reveling in its righteousness!

Gilligan and the Skipper: The traffic started getting rough; the chicken had to cross. If not for the plumage of its peerless tail the chicken would be lost, the chicken would be lost.

Deanna Troi: It was experiencing -- GREAT PAIN -- TORMENT!

George Bush: Read my chicken lips. To face a kinder, gentler thousand points of headlights.

Kurt Vonnegut: And so it goes -- to the other side.

H. Ross Perot: No, no, it's not about me, Larry. It's about the chicken.

Robert Frost: To cross the road less traveled by.

Jean Chretien: OK, for me, de chicken, 'e crossed de road because 'is team was der, and because 'e 'ad de plan.

Bob Dole: Bob Dole says "To get to the other side."

Sigmund Freud: The chicken obviously was female and obviously interpreted the pole on which the cross walk sign was mounted as a phallic symbol of which she was envious, selbstverstaendlich.

Bill Gates: We own the road. We own the chicken. It's none of your damn business.

Western New York Retailers: To see the hens in Hens & Kelly's window.

Omar Khayam: The moving chicken fingers write, and having writ, move on.

Moses: Know ye that it is unclean to eat the chicken that has crossed the road, and that the chicken that crosseth the road doth so for its own preservation.

Sir Isaac Newton: Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest. Chickens in motion tend to cross the road.

Plato: For the greater good.

Pierre de Fermat: I just don't have room here to give the full explanation...

Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.

Chico Marx: Why a duck? Why-a-no chicken?

Groucho Marx: You try to cross over there a chicken, and you'll find out why-a-no chicken. It's deep water, that's viaduct.

WWNN's Adam Clatsoff: If you had been hatched where the chicken was hatched, and had been raised where the chicken was raised, and eaten the same chicken feed that the chicken had eaten, you probably would have crossed the road, too.

WFTL's Dante DeAngelis: Now let me get this straight. You're saying a chicken crossed the road, and now YOU'RE asking ME, "WHY?"

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.

Captain James T. Kirk: To boldly go where no chicken has gone before.

Mr. Spock: It seemed like the logical thing to do at the time.

Colonel Harlan Sanders: It wasn't one of our chickens. They don't have to, because now KFC delivers!

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!

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)

Al Bundy: It was married... With children!

Marcy Jefferson: Why do you keep calling me a chicken?

Kelly Bundy: How do you spell chicken?

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.

Walter Cronkite: That's the way it is.

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.

Monty Python: The Larch.

Douglas Adams: Forty-two.

Marcel Marceau:

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.

Craig Crossman, host of Computer America: To lay hundreds, even thousands, of eggs.

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?

President Ronald Reagan: Ask Mommy. 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.

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

Senator Edward Moore "Teddy" Kennedy: I panicked.

Katherine McKinnon: Because, in this patriarchial state, for the last four centuries, men have applied their principles of justice in determining how chickens should be cared for, their language has demeaned the identity of the chicken, their technonogy and trucks have decided how and where chickens will be distributed, their science has become the basis for what chickens eat, their sense of humor has provided the framework for this joke, their art and film have given us our perception of chicken life, their lust for flesh has has made the chicken the most consumned animal in the US, and their legal system has left the chicken with no other recourse.

Stephen Jay Gould: It is possible that there is a sociobiological explanation for it, but we have been deluged in recent years with sociobiological stories despite the fact that we have little direct evidence about the genetics of behavior, and we do not know how to obtain it for the specific behaviors that figure most prominently in sociobiological speculation.

Joseph Stalin: I don't care. Catch it. I need its eggs to make my omlette.

Malcolm X: It was coming home to roost.

Louis Farrakkan It wasn't one chicken, you lying white devils! It was TEN MILLION chickens!

Dr. Emmett Brown: Road? Where we're going we don't need roads!

Technical Writer David H. Citron the author of this page: Why do you expect ME to know the answer to this? Who cares? I don't follow celebrity gossip. Why are so many people so concerned about what celebrities and jocks do -- and so uninterested in the really important news, about what the crooks and incompetents do in Washington, the state capital, and the county courthouse? Blah, blah, blah...

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