[13911] in Athena Bugs
junk mail
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher Paul Barrington-Leigh)
Tue Oct 10 21:37:34 1995
To: bug@MIT.EDU, steve@MIT.EDU
Date: Tue, 10 Oct 95 21:37:19 EDT
From: Christopher Paul Barrington-Leigh <cpbarrin@MIT.EDU>
Hi. Bug once invited me to send more junk mail, so here you are. I have seen
this many times before, and maybe even read some of it once, but it's on tour
again. It seems to have grown a lot, too. It's a waste of time!
cpbl
------- Forwarded Message
Subject: 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.
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 meet the chicken on the road, kill it.
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.
Jack Nicholson: 'Cause it (censored) wanted to. That's the
(censored)
reason.
Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?
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.
Oliver North: National Security was at stake.
Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.
Saddam Hussein: This was an unprovoked act of rebellion and we were
quite justified in dropping 50 tons of nerve gas on it.
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.
NASA Administrator Dan Goldin: This problem was addressed by a
multicultural (including the intellectually challenged) NASA strategy
team trained in Total Quality Management. Since the word "chicken" has
pejorative connotations and was not in conformance with acceptable
nomenclature, the proposal was renamed "Why did the avian of color cross
the road. The proposal was studied by the enacting team using FY95 funds
which were obligated and committed for this purpose. A preliminary report
was prepared for the Augustine Review Committee, who recommended that
several changes be made in the proposal and that the whole strategy team
be relocated to Houston.
Meanwhile, due to cuts in the FY96 budget as part of the program to
make NASA faster, cheaper and better, no resources are currently
available to finish the project. The answer to the question "Why did
the avian of color cross the road? will be contingent on obtaining
alternative sources of funding after proposals have been submitted in
response to the next Announcement of Opportunity.
Gene Roddenberry: To boldly go where no chicken has gone before.
Stalin: To get to Siberia.
Hitler: For Lebensraum.
Kurt Vonnegut: Some chemicals in its brain caused the chicken to feel
desire to cross the road. The meaning of this action in Trafalmadorian
is: We have encountered some unexpected delays in getting spare parts
to you.
Hegel: The action of the chicken in crossing the road expresses an
ineffable aspect of the Ideal which can only be expressed this way.
Through the chicken, the Ideal comes to know itself. Chicken and
anti-chicken will inevitably produce conflict out of which arises a
new synthesis, perhaps a recipe for chicken salad.
Stan Laurel: I'm sorry, Ollie. I left the hen-house door open.
Sir Isaac Newton: A chicken at rest remains at rest; a chicken in
motion remains in motion.
Capt. James Tiberius Kirk: To boldly go where no hen has gone before.
Plato: The ideal chicken must ideally cross the ideal road. Therefore,
imperfect chickens in this world cross imperfect roads, imperfectly.
Karl Marx: Driven by the lash of economic necessity.
Aristotle: It is the essence of chickens to cross the road.
Lao Tse: Those who cluck do not know. Those who know do not cluck.
Capt. Jean Luc Picard: To see what's out there.
Col. Oliver North: It was a national security matter.
Basil Fawlty: Oh, never mind that chicken. She's from Barcelona.
Sir Edmund Hilary: Because it's there.
The Kingston Trio:
The lions still roam the barranca
And a hen there is always alone.
Sigmund Freud: The telephone pole suggested a phallic symbol and like
all female creatures she wanted to be dominated.
Jacques Derrida: The question admits of limitless answers, since there
is no one logocentric strategy of discourse that takes primacy over
all others.
Oscar Wilde: This chicken problem has many depths, but all of them are
equally shallow.
Lyndon LaRouche: She was a victim of the English Gnostic Drug Cartel
conspiracy.
Pat Robertson: She was a victim of the Illuminati One World
conspiracy.
Gloria Steinem: She was a victim of the male conspiracy.
Budd Hopkins: She was dazed and disoriented after the
extra-terrestrials abducted and genetically altered her.
Douglas Adams: Forty-two.
Aleister Crowley: It was her True Will to cross just that road on just
that day.
Vito Corleone: We made her an offer she couldn't refuse.
Sappho: To kiss your skin, to lie with you in moonlight...
Jean Paul Sartre: To impose a meaning upon her accidental existence.
William Faulkner:
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, and so the secret of the crust remained, a hermetic mystery,
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 shop 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, "Extra crispy, please."
T.S.Eliot:
To leave the place she knew for another place And to stay there for a
while And then to visit both places.
Thomas Jefferson: All hens are endowed by Nature and Nature's God with
the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of the other side.
Omar Khayyam:
I sent a hen through the astral plane To learn our future, and man's
luck, And by a by the bird returned
But all she'd say was "Cluck, cluck, cluck!"
Sherlock Holmes: 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.
Confucius: 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.
H.P. Lovecraft: 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
Friederich Nietzsche: There was no chicken, no road, no crossing.
There was only an interpretation.
William S. Burroughs:
This Department recalls the distasteful incident
of the Chainsaw Subliminals -- World falling -- Photo falling --
Breakthrough in hen yard -- Towers open fire --
A few may get through to the Gate in Time --
Darth Vader: She was seduced by the dark side of the road.
Raymond Chandler: 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 take off and never look back.
Christopher Smart
I will consider my hen, Brigit,
For she is a servant of the living God,
Rising in the dawn to praise the Sun in her song, Retiring at dusk
like an honest worker,
Making by Alchemy from simple seeds
The wonder of an egg to feed me at breakfast: 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!
Will Shakespeare:
Why, let us feather our brutish nests
In this barnyard Athens -- 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 And blackest night
falls on the king and commoner.
James Joyce
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.
Bart Simpson: 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
Weekly World News: Nostradamus predicted chicken/UFO horror!
Hannibal Lecter, M.D.: I ate her liver. With fava beans. And a
brandied cranberry sauce.
- ------- End of Forwarded Message
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