Why Did the Chicken . . .

[Craig Browning]

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 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, 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.

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.

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.

Samuel Beckett:
It got tired of waiting.

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

Albert Camus:
The gods had commanded it to cross and recross the road.

Winston Churchill:
It was moving into broad sunlit uplands...

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

Emily Dickinson:
Because it could not stop for death.

Conan Doyle:
It is quite a three-pipe problem, Watson.

T. S. Eliot:
To examine the wasteland for worms.

Epicurus:
For fun.

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

Richard Feynman:
Surely it was joking.

Johann Wolfgang 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.

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.

George Mallory:
Because it was there.

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

Pyrrho the Skeptic:
What road?

Ronald Reagan:
I forget.

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.

Mr. T:
If you saw me coming you'd cross the road too!

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.

Molly Yard:
It was a hen!

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

Beatles:
It was a long and winding road...

Pennsylvania/NJ travel guide:
When travelling along the Road, visit the beautiful town of Chicken
Crossing.

George Bush:
Read my lips: no more chicken crossing roads.

O. J. Simpson:
His wife lived across the road.

Umberto Eco:
It was a part of the Plan.

???
He was solving the cross-road puzzle.

A palusible Russian explanation:
They ran out of vodka, and he wanted to get to the liquor store
three miles down the road.

Elmer Fudd:
He cwossed the woad to kill the wabbit.

Charles Dickens:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, chicken were
crossing roads, chicken were staying behind...

Orwell:
All roads are crossable by all chicken, but some roads are more
crossable than others.

Dostoyevsky:
After having killed an old hen, the chicken was wandering deliriously
along the empty night streets of St. Petersburg and waiting for the
darkness that never came; he crossed Nevsky and after a while found
himself in an unfamiliar part of the city.

???
To prove that he was no chicken.

???
Because for every road you cross, there are ten more roads yet
uncrossed.

Ecclesiast:
There are times for the chicken to cross roads and there are times
to stay at the roadside.

Hamlet:
For '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...

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.

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.

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


[_Princess Bride_ section]

Wesley:
It's terribly fashionable, I think everyone will be doing
it in the future.

Fezzik:
Because if it did not it would be like a toad!

Inigo:
Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You crossed my father's
road. Prepare to die.
______________

George Bush:
To face a kinder, gentler thousand points of headlights.

Julius Caesar:
Because Pompey threw the die.

Moses:
Know ye that it is unclean to eat the chicken that has
crossed the road, and that the chicken that crosseth the
road doth so for its own preservation.

Bob Dylan:
How many roads must one chicken cross?

T. S. Eliot:
Weialala leia / Wallala leialala.

T. S. Eliot (revisited):
Do I dare, do I dare, do I dare cross the road?

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

Zsa Zsa Gabor:
It probably crossed to get a better look at my legs, which,
thank goodness, are good, dahling.

Martin Luther King:
It had a dream.

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

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.

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

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

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

Wolfgang Pauli (bis):
NEIN, NEIN, NEIN, YOU ARE COMPLETELY WRONG!!
... Chicken what?

Margaret Thatcher:
There was no alternative.

Joe Premed:
It was a requirement.

Edgar Allan Poe
Never More.

Chief Dan George
It was a good day to Die.

???
He was daft.

[ProfWag]

Great stuff Craig! My favorite answer has always been: To prove to the opossum it could be done... (Unknown)

[August West]

Why did the dinosaur cross the road?

Because chickens didn't exist yet.

[Twain Shakespeare]

Poul Anderson - in the character of Ogier du Danmark

"You ever try to walk around one?"

[Twain Shakespeare]

"I dream of a better world where chickens may cross the road without having thir motives questioned."