posted 05-30-99 02:21 AM ET        

Stalin: Grab her and take her to Sibir, she'll confess everything there.

Lincoln: She's better of crossing the streets then going to the teather

Machiaveli: The only thing that matters is that she menaged to cross the street. It doesn't matter why and using what she did it.

Froyd: The fact that you are thinking about the movement of the chicken displays your unhidden fear of sex.

Richard Nixon: The chicken didn't cross the street. I repeat: the chicken didn't cross the street.

Charles Darvin: This shows the natural selection of chicken for crossing streets.

Martin Luther King: I dream that one day the world will be a place where all chicken will be ablo to cross the street without beeing asked why they did it.

Albert Einstain: Everything is relative, so we cannot be sure if the chicken crossed the street or the street crossed the chicken.

Piron The Sckeptic: What street?

Imanuel Kant: The chicken as an anonymus creature decided to cross the street by it's free will.

Niche: She had to cross it. Because if you walk a street too long the street will start walking on you.

Carl Marx: It's a historic inevitability.

George Orvell: She bealived that she wass crossing the street by it's free will, but it was a goverment conspiracy all along.

Oliver Stone: The question is not why the chicken crossed the street, but who crossed it at the same time to see the chicken do it?

O. J. Simpson: I don't know. Didn't see it. And i have an alibi, was playing golf at the time.

posted 05-30-99 05:07 PM ET            

JFK: It didn't cross the street because it was easy, but because it was hard.

Neil Armstrong: That's one small step for a chicken, one giant leap for chicken-kind

Colonel Sanders: Get back in the deep frier!

posted 06-01-99 07:36 PM ET            

On a somewhat related note, this poem:
Mary had a little lamb,
She sold the lamb to Spiro's,
And everywhere that Mary went,
She couldn't eat the gyros.

posted 06-01-99 08:30 PM ET            

Machiavelli₂: 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.

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)

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.

Nietzsche₂: 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.

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 Einstein₂: 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 a Herculean achievement formerly relegated to Homo sapiens pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurrence.

Salvador Dali: The Fish.

Darwin₂: 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 Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.

Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.

Hemingway: To die. In the rain.

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.

Ronald Reagan: I forget.

Bill Clinton: It did not inhale. Define "road". Did I mention that I am truly sorry?

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.

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

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

MacKinnon: 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 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 Stalin₂: I don't care. Catch it. I need its eggs to make my omlette.

posted 06-01-99 09:17 PM ET            

C: It crosses the road without looking both ways.

C++: The chicken wouldn't have to cross the road, you'd simply refer to him on the other side.

COBOL:
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

Cray: Crosses faster than any other chicken, but if you don't dip it in liquid nitrogen first, it arrives on the other side fully cooked.

Delphi: The chicken is dragged across the road and dropped on the other side.

G3 300 MHz: It crosses twice as fast as any Pentium chicken

Gopher: Tried to run, but got flattened by the Web chicken.

Intel Pentium: The chicken crossed 4.9999978 times.

Iomega: The chicken should have backed up before crossing.

Java: If your road needs to be crossed by a chicken, the server will download one to the other side. (Of course, those are chicklets.)

Lotus: Don't you dare try to cross the road the same way we do!

Mac: No reasonable chicken owner would want a chicken to cross the road, so there's no way to tell it to.

Microsoft: It's already on both sides of the road. And it just bought the road.

Newton: Can't cluck fly, or lay eggs, but you can carry it across the road in your pocket!

Windows NT: Will cross the road in June. No, August. September for sure.

OOP: It doesn't need to cross the road, it just sends a message.

OS/2: It crossed the road in style years ago, but it was so quiet that nobody noticed.

OS/ 8.1 HFS+: It had much more free space to cross.

Quantum Logic: The chicken is distributed probabalistically on all sides of the road until you observe it on the side of your choice.

Web: Jumps out onto the road, turns right, and just keeps on running.

Windows 95: You see different colored feathers while it crosses, but cook it and it still tastes like ... chicken.