WHY DID THE CHICKEN
CROSS THE ROAD?

Plato: For the greater good.

Karl Marx: It was an historical inevitability.

Hamlet: Because 'tis better to suffer in the mind the slings and arrows of outrageous road maintenance than to take arms against a sea of oncoming vehicles.

Doug Hofstadter: To seek explication of the correspondence between appearance and essence through the mapping of the external road-object onto the internal road-concept.

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.

H.P. Lovecraft: To futilely attempt escape from the dark powers which even then pursued it, hungering after the stuff of its soul!

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.

Robert Anton Wilson: Because agents of the Ancient Illuminated Roosters of Cooperia were controlling it with their Orbital Mind-Control Lasers as part of their master plan to take over the world's egg production.

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.

Aleister Crowley: Because it was its True Will to do so.

Oliver North: National Security was at stake.

Sappho: For the touch of your skin, the sweetness of your lips...

J.R.R. Tolkein: The chicken, sunlight coruscating off its radiant yellow- white coat of feathers, approached the dark, sullen asphalt road and scrutinized it intently with its obsidian-black eyes. Every detail of the thoroughfare leapt into blinding focus: the rough texture of the surface, over which count- less tires had worked their relentless tread through the ages; the innumerable fragments of stone embedded within the lugubrious mass, perhaps quarried from the great pits where the Sons of Man labored not far from here; the dull black asphalt itself, exuding those waves of heat which distort the sight and bring weakness to the body; the other attributes of the great highway too numerous to give name. And then it crossed it.

Malcolm X: Because it would get across that road by any means necessary.

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.

Gary Gygax: Because I rolled a 64 on the "Chicken Random Behaviors" chart on page 497 of the Dungeon Master's Guide.

Trent Reznor: Because the world is FUCKED UP and it HATES ITSELF for being such a PITIFUL WHINY USELESS SHIT!

Dorothy Parker: Travel, trouble, music, art / A kiss, a frock, a rhyme / The chicken never said they fed its heart / But still they pass its time.

T.S. Eliot: It's not that they cross, but that they cross like chickens.

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

Jean-Luc Picard: To see what's out there.

Darth Vader: Because it could not resist the power of the Dark Side.

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.

John Constantine: Because it'd made a bollocks of things over on this side of the road and figured it'd better get out right quick.

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

Gandalf: O chicken, do not meddle in the affairs of roads, for you are tasty and good with barbecue sauce.

Baldrick: It had a cunning plan.

Aristotle: To actualize its potential.

Roseanne Barr: Urrrrrp. What chicken?

Candide: To cultivate its garden.

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

Joseph Conrad: Mistah Chicken, he dead.

Salvador Dali: The Fish.

Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.

Rene Descartes: It had sufficient reason to believe it was dreaming anyway.

Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.

Bob Dylan: How many roads must one chicken cross?

Epicurus: For fun.

Paul Erdos: It was forced to do so by the chicken-hole principle.

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

Basil Fawlty: Oh, don't mind that chicken. It's from Barcelona.

Gerald R. Ford: It probably fell from an airplane and couldn't stop its forward momentum.

Sigmund Freud: The chicken obviously was female and obviously interpreted the pole on which the crosswalk sign was mounted as a phallic symbol of which she was envious, selbstverständlich.

Robert Frost: To cross the road less traveled by.

Johann Friedrich 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.

Adolf Hitler: It needed Lebensraum.

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.

Lee Iacocca: It found a better car, which was on the other side of the road.

John Paul Jones: It has not yet begun to cross!

Martin Luther King: It had a dream.

James Tiberius Kirk: To boldly go where no chicken has gone before.

Jean-Luc Picard: To boldly go where no bird has gone before.

Stan Laurel: I'm sorry, Ollie. It escaped when I opened the run.

Leda: Are you sure it wasn't Zeus dressed up as a chicken? He's into that kind of thing, you know.

Gottfried Von Leibniz: In this best possible world, the road was made for it to cross.

Groucho Marx: Chicken? What's all this talk about chicken? Why, I had an uncle who thought he was a chicken. My aunt almost divorced him, but we needed the eggs.

Karl Marx: To escape the bourgeois middle-class struggle.

Gregor Mendel: To get various strains of roads.

John Milton: To justify the ways of God to men.

Sir Isaac Newton: Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest. Chickens in motion tend to cross the road.

Jack Nicholson: 'Cause it fuckin' wanted to. That's the fuckin' reason.

Thomas Paine: Out of common sense.

Michael Palin: Nobody expects the banished inky chicken!

Wolfgang Pauli: There already was a chicken on the other side of the road.

Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?

Ronald Reagan: I can't recall why, uh, um. Did you say it was a chicken?

Georg Friedrich Riemann: The answer appears in Dirichlet's lectures.

John Sununu: The Air Force was only too happy to provide the transportation, so quite understandably the chicken availed himself of the opportunity.

Sisyphus: Was it pushing a rock, too?

Socrates: To pick up some hemlock at the corner druggist.

The Sphinx: You tell me.

Margaret Thatcher: There was no alternative.

Bill Clinton: Did someone say chicken? Why I think I'll just chase that chick across the road and snatch me a piece.

Beavis: Heh heh, he said "snatch." Heh heh, heh heh.

Butthead: Shut up, Bevis, or I'll smack you so hard you'll end up on the other side of the road.

Dylan Thomas: To not go (sic) gentle into that good night.

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.

Mae West: I invited it to come up and see me sometime.

Walt Whitman: To cluck the song of itself.

William Wordsworth: To have something to recollect in tranquility.

Molly Yard: It was a hen!

Henny Youngman: Take this chicken ... please.

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

Mr. Scott: 'Cos ma wee transporter beam was na functioning properly. Ah canna work miracles, Captain!

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 occurrence.

Thomas Jefferson: All hens are endowed by Nature and Nature's God with certain unalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of the other side.

James Joyce: An ova eggspressed! Mrs. Hahn, Cock's wife, flapped up a stormin drang (one louve, one fear) and, like any tennis son, charged like a lewd brigade, clucking and clacking like a horsenfifer, nobirdy avair soar anywing like that load allmarshey.

Bart Simpson: I will not use the school chicken as a frisbee. I will not use the school chicken as

Oscar Wilde: This chicken problem has many depths, but all of them are equally shallow.

Weekly World News: Nostradamus predicted chicken/UFO horror!

Charles Fort: Of course, I have heard of the "fourth dimension" but whatever is wrong with me has not advanced to the point where I will offer it as an explanation in a case like this. Maybe the damned chicken just wanted to see the other side. Maybe.

Hannibal Lecter: I ate her liver. With fava beans. And a fresh cranberry sauce.