Why DID the chicken cross the road?

[Triple Zero]

"Wax on, wax off."
- Captain Jean-Luc Skywalker, First Jedi of space station Deathstar Nine

"eggenstate"

[Triple Zero]

"Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell. A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in wings that are not wings, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead roads with sores that were cracks in the asphalt, charnel winds that brush the pallid streetlights and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen poles of unsanctified road signs that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting organic and free-range interchange the muffled, maddening clucking of hens, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous birds from inconceivable, unlighted roadsides beyond Time; the detestable unending filthy roads whereunto cross slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate fowl — the blind, voiceless, mindless poultry whose soul is Nyarlathotep."  —  HP Lovecraft

[Lenin McCarthy]

"The chicken crossed the goddamn road and all because, I don't know really. I guess it was going through a phase or something. All chickens go through phases, don't they?" - J.D. Salinger

[Eater of Clowns]

"The chicken crossed the road.  Its anus looked like this:  *  The hen house caught on fire after a gust of wind knocked over farmer Michael Freedbrandt's candle.  Michael Freedbrandt's penis is 6.25 inches in length and 2.19 inches in girth.  He was in the outhouse after eating a spicy pork pie brought over by his neighbors Alan Heffernan and his wife Judy Heffernan.  Alan Heffernan's penis is 5.82 inches in length and 3.31 inches in girth.  The chicken found a grub on the far side of the road."
-Kurt Vonnegut

[Cain]

The chicken exists as an organ-machine driven by other organ-machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections.  Something is produced, the effect of the chicken organ-machine, not mere metaphors.

A chicken crossing the road is a better model than a chicken in a battery farm.  While crossing a road, a chicken is in the mountains, amid falling snowflakes, with other gods, or without any gods at all, without a family, without a mother or father, with nature.  Everything is a chicken-machine.  Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine machines - all of them connected to those of its body.  The continual whirr of machines.  The chicken has transported itself back to a time before the chicken-road dichotomy, before all the co-ordinates based on this fundamental dichotomy have been laid down.  He does not cross roads as roads, but as a process of production.  There is no such thing either chicken or roads now, only a process that produces one within the other and couples the machines together.  Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines of all species of life: the chicken and the non-chicken, road and non-road, no longer have any meaning whatsoever.

- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

[The Good Reverend Roger]

"The chicken crossed the road.  Its anus looked like this:  *  The hen house caught on fire after a gust of wind knocked over farmer Michael Freedbrandt's candle.  Michael Freedbrandt's penis is 6.25 inches in length and 2.19 inches in girth.  He was in the outhouse after eating a spicy pork pie brought over by his neighbors Alan Heffernan and his wife Judy Heffernan.  Alan Heffernan's penis is 5.82 inches in length and 3.31 inches in girth.  The chicken found a grub on the far side of the road."
-Kurt Vonnegut

Needs:  "Michael Freedbrandt wasn't a particularly good farmer, as predicted by his father.  Nor was he married, having the interest but not the will required to talk to women.  He had been this way his whole life.  He rather suspected that he would be imprisoned eventually, for a stupid reason, or no reason at all.  And so on."

[Cain]

In Iran, we do not have chickens, like in your country. [...] In Iran we do not have this phenomenon. I don't know who's told you that we have this.
- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

"The chicken hates crossing the road, but loves having crossed it." --Dorothy Parker

[Cain]

If we want a world ruled by law and by international co-operation then we have to support the act of chickens crossing the road, for whatever purpose, as its central pillar. But we need to find a new way to make chickens and their roads work if we are not to return to the deadlock that undermined the effectiveness of the road-crossings during the Cold War. This should be a task for members of the Permanent Five to consider once the Kosovo conflict is complete.
- Tony Blair, Speech on 'Doctrine of the International Community, Economic Club, Chicago, 24 April 1999.

[LMNO]

"She rises up out of a sea of faces and embraces me, embraces me passionately--- a thousand eyes, beaks, wings, feathers, wattles, all glaring at us and we in each other's arm oblivious. I sit down beside her and she clucks--- a flood of clucks. Wild consumptive notes of hysteria, perversion, leprosy. I hear not a word because she is beautiful and I love her and now I am happy and willing to cross that road."

Henry Miller

[AFK]

No, Who is the chicken that took the bus.  -  William Abbot

[navkat]

                                                                           1.

Chicken saw the sign and breathed out. He had been gritting his beak for the last twenty miles or so without even realizing it. Twenty miles of watching the rows of densely-packed cornstalks with seemingly no end. He'd begun to see them thin out over the last ten minutes or so: first, little gaps, then larger gaps until the gaps became open spaces. Finally, the scenery had begun to shift and now, as he felt himself loosen, he realized he could taste the thick, stale, pastiness of having gone too long without a drop coming up like from the bottom of his crop like sand on his tongue.

You know this ain't finished.

The words, scrawled in what looked like a kindergartener's hand, were stark against the background of the filthy, painted-white section of particle board. Chicken could see the thing had been painted and repainted many times over the years--just the letters, not the background and so age and weather had taken its toll. The panel, no doubt having been soaked by countless Maine rainstorms and parched in the relentless heat, had a slightly puffed out appearance in contrast to the black scrawl. The white paint, now greyed with grime, matched the now-darkening sky and the painted-over, splintered edges made the sign blend with the thunderheads behind it. The effect was that the poorly placed, misspelled words looked almost scratched, as though done by some animal, into the surface of the sky itself. 

You ain't gettin' out of this one, buckaroo.

Chicken put the shanks down hard now. Suddenly, he became aware of himself and could feel the sweat drip down the ol' wattles. I'll be glad to wash the stink of that cheap henhouse off me. He paused. For a moment, he saw Camilla: the light of the moon reflected off the glistening, pale of her body. The way she looked just before--

It ain't gonna work. This ain't gonna fly, my friend. 

Chicken felt panic well up. He got the urge to change direction and keep blowing past but he put it out of his mind. Somewhere, deep at the bottom of his throat was a lump that knew things his head didn't but for now, he had to keep himself focused. There was no point in running around aimless, he had to keep his head: he had immediate needs and the answers, at least for now, were behind that sign.

-Stephen King

[Triple Zero]

Gilles Deleuze

How odd. There's a Dutch historical comic whose main character Gilles de Geus is obviously named after this guy but I can't for the life of me figure out why.

[LMNO]

Nav, that was spot on.

[Cain]

Gilles Deleuze

How odd. There's a Dutch historical comic whose main character Gilles de Geus is obviously named after this guy but I can't for the life of me figure out why.

Deleuze has a lot of pop culture pull.  He's not quite Baudrillard, but since he spent a lot of his philosophy career actually doing literature and cinematic reviews (nice gig if you can get it), a lot of artistic people are semi-aware of him and his views.