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 black bile and a deficiency of



                      choleric humour.







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 ask this question, you deny your own chicken-



                      nature.







David Hume:           Out of custom and habit.







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.







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



                      reason.







Pyrrho the Skeptic:   What road?







The Sphinx:           You tell me.





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



                      out of life.





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.





Ronald Reagan:        I forget.





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





Zeno of Elea:         To prove it could never reach the other side.





END

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