Why did the Chicken Cross the Road?

(or I’m a real slacker who hasn’t updated in years and will be whipped accordingly)

(and yes I know it’s lame and has been seen before – so sue me!)

Plato: For the greater good.

Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.

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.

Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronictitiously brought such ccurrences 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.

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 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.

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.

Jack Nicholson: ’cause it (censored) wanted to. That’s the (censored) reason.

Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?

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.

Sappho: Due to the loveliness of the hen on the other side, more fair than all of Hellas’ fine armies.

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.

Stephen Jay 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 Stalin: I don’t care. Catch it. Crack its eggs to make my omlette.

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

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 phlegm in its pancreas.

Andersen Consultant: Deregulation of the chicken’s side of the road was threatening its dominant market position. The chicken was faced with significant challenges to create and develop the competencies required for the newly competitive market. Andersen Consulting, in a partnering relationship with the client, helped the chicken by rethinking its physical distribution strategy and implementation processes. Using the Poultry Integration Model (PIM) Andersen helped the chicken use its skills, methodologies, knowledge capital and experiences to align the chicken’s people, processes and technology in support of its overall strategy within a Program Management framework. Andersen Consulting convened a diverse cross-spectrum of road analysts and best chickens along with Andersen consultants with deep skills in the transportation industry to engage in a two-day itinerary of meetings in order to leverage their personal knowledge capital, both tacit and explicit, and to enable them to synergize with each other in order to achieve the implicit goals of delivering and successfully architecting and implementing an enterprise-wide value framework across the continuum of poultry cross-median processes. The meeting was held in a park-like setting enabling and creating an impactful environment which was strategically based, industry-focused, and built upon a consistent, clear, and unified market message and aligned with the chicken’s mission, vision, and core values. This was conducive towards the creation of a total business integration solution. Andersen Consulting helped the chicken change to become more successful.

PPS: Lookee! My shelves! The wowfabgroovy FOMS

Attack of the Killer Knickers!

(or why I have a love/hate relationship with shopping)

Heather blogged it. Kylie noticed it too. Why are women’s clothes, and the shopping thereof – especially underwear – such a bloody nightmare? Now, I might hear a few blokes chiming in, nodding in agreement, remembering the mad pre-Christmas/birthday dash round the lingerie section, wildly gesticulating to the sales assistant’s breasts, and saying, “ooh, she’s a bit bigger than that”.

But I’m not talking about that. You bring that on yourself, mate. If you’ve decided that sexy sussies are what she wants for her birthday/Christmas (and no, crotchless red lace isn’t sexy, it’s slutty), then all you have to do is look in her undies drawer to check out her size, and Bob’s your uncle!

Nope, what I’m talking about is when you actually need some essential item of clothing, precipitating the need to go out and purchase said item. Such as buying underwear to replace the choice pieces of Marks and Spencer’s finest, which got eaten by the crappy university washing machines last term. Shopping is immediately a chore by its very nature in instances such as these: it’s a mission, something you have to do, a check on your to-do list, a responsibility, a weight hanging over your shoulder. It’s work, dammit.

And talk about mission impossible! I’m not asking the world. It’s not like I was looking for Wonder Woman Underoos (which, by the way, I found, later that day, purely by chance!) or anything. Just some plain black cotton knicks, in my size. Apparently they are an endangered species in Manchester city centre, the second largest city in England. A plethora of white thongs! A glut of elephant-sized old-lady pants that could house a small family and their three cats! But not a single pair of said knickers in a size 8 or 10, nooo. And bras! Or tights! Nope, nary a 34B black bra to be found. Or black tights in medium. One long frustration, I feel…

It’s not that I actually hate shopping. Shopping when you’re not actually shopping, when you’re just meandering, and you happen upon some really funky item that you didn’t know you wanted but you just have to have, and you’ve actually got the moola in your wallet to buy it, is fabulous. But when you’re under the pressure of time, fighting the clock to get back home in time for Blind Date and a night necking vodkas down the pub with the girls, then it’s all just too much to take.

I ask you!

PS: If updates are sporadic, it’s ’cause I’m back at Uni and I’ve got an exam. See you soon, dahlings…

Less dope-smoking, rave-dancing, fewer flowerpot men hats

(or the rebirth of manchester)

So there was an article in today’s Guardian all about the revamping of my home city, the rebirth of ‘Mad’chester. ‘Mad’chester, crazy clubbing capital of Europe, place of too many drugs, bands with cool names and long hair, baggy jeans and, erm, flowerpot men hats. Party all night! Sleep is for wimps! Yeah, mad fer it, dontcha know!

Erm, except that I sort of missed out on all that. Well, forgive me if I wasn’t a pill-popping, Drew-Barrymore-esque ten year old, but I sort of bypassed the whole Madchester thing. Unfortunately, the “youth culture scene every 10 years which will be copied by the rest of Britain and then exported to US trailer parks” didn’t filter down to me, ’cause the bubble had burst before I was able to enjoy it. Bastards!

So now I’m coming home to loft apartment world. Wining and dining world, we don’t-do-pints-just-a-cosmopolitan-and-martini type places. But I ask you this: can you really glam up a place where the avant-garde art exhibition “I, Mancunian” is subtitled “I only went with your mother ‘cos she’s dirty”?

OK, we’ve had some pretty cool exports since the halcyon days of the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays. Queer as Folk and Badly Drawn Boy for starters. But do you honestly think cheese and wine parties in swanky loft apartments work in a town where the phrase “Come and ‘ave a go if you think you’re ‘ard enough?” resonates round the streets of a Saturday night.

So there you have it: the Republic of Mancunia, city of class!