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
Back to the UO Philosophy Department
To the Cognitive Science of Metaphor Online
|