Why did the chicken cross the road?

An oldy, but a goody...

• Douglas Adams • Forty-two.

• Aristotle • To actualize its potential.

• Buddha • If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.

• 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 Onanian Press)

• 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 sapiens pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurence.

• Salvador Dali • The Fish.

• Darwin • Because in the past chickens that crossed the road had differential reproductive success over chickens that stayed on only one side of the road.

• 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.

• Emily Dickinson • Because it could not stop for death.

• Albert Einstein • Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.

• Epicurus • For fun.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson • It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.

• Sigmund Freud • It was driven by profound emotional conflicts engendered by its attraction to its mother.

• Johann Friedrich von Goethe • The eternal hen-principle made it do it.

• 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.

• Werner Heisenberg • We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.

• Ernest Hemingway • To die. In the rain.

• Hippocrates • Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas.

• 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.

• 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.

• Timothy Leary • Because that's the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take.

• 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.

• Karl Marx • It was a historical inevitability.

• 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.

• Nietzsche • Because if you gaze too long across the road, the road gazes also across you.

• Jack Nicholson • 'Cause it (censored) wanted to. That's the (censored) reason.

• Oliver North • National Security was at stake.

• Plato • For the greater good.

• Ronald Reagan • With a charming slightly crooked smile, "I forgot."

• Jean-Paul Sartre • In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.

• Pyrrho the Skeptic • What road?

• 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.

• The Sphinx • You tell me.

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

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

• Thomas de Torquemada • Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I'll find out.

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

• 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.

• Malcom X • It was coming home to roost.