January 2012
16 posts
“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
—Oscar Wilde
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 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?
- 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.
- Yeats: She was following the Faeries that sang to her to come away with them from the dull, bucolic comfort of the farmyard to the waters and the wild.
- Shelley: 'Tis a metaphor for the pursuits of man: though 'twas deemed an extraordinary occurrence at the time, still it brought little to bear on the great scheme of time and history, and was ultimately fruitless and forgotten.
- Tolkien: Chickens are respectable folk, and well thought of. They never go on any adventures or do anything unexpected. One fine spring day, as the chicken wandered contentedly around the farmyard, clucking and pecking and enjoying herself immensely, there appeared a Wizard and thirteen Dwarves who were in need of a chicken to share in their adventure. Reluctantly she joined their party, and with them crossed the road into the great Unknown, muttering about how rude the Dwarves were to take her away on such short notice, without even giving her time to brush her feathers or fetch her hat.
“And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter— they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long.”
—Sylvia Plath
“Imagine that you are French. You are walking along a busy pavement in Paris and another pedestrian is approaching from the opposite direction. A collision will occur unless you each move out of the other’s way. Which way do you step?”
—Understanding and modelling how pedestrians behave is a youngish field for researchers. Anticipating pedestrian flows makes crowd events smoother and safer, and accounting for the peculiar propensities of different nationalities is key to getting it right. (via theeconomist)
