Hey Hey and a Big G'Day toya,

Why did the chicken cross the road?
As they say; 'different spokes for different folks!
Have you ever asked that question with an honest realistic reason attached to it?

So there I was peacefully riding through the far away village I call ‘Cartoon Village’ and as usual in rural areas there were chickens scattered here, there and everywhere. Now I am not sure about you, but as a bike rider I find the chicken simply bewildering. They are safe on the side of the road and you can easily pass them by without danger or worry, yet for some strange reason they find it important to race across the road in front of you to simply get to the other side where they then stop and continue on as before.

So why in the world do they actually need to cross the road?

In all of my years riding China, thousands of chickens have felt the need to cross the road as I am approaching and thankfully all of them have actually made it...until today. Like I said above, there I was peacefully riding through Cartoon Village and I spotted (what is a group of chickens called anyhow? Let’s call them A Burger of or a Wrap of or a Cordon Bleu of or a Parmagina of Chickens,) so a parmagima of chickens were on the road side ahead of me and seemed quite content in going about their chicken business so I continued with my peddling business and just as I approached;

One of them squawked and for some reason felt the need to get to the other side.
It tried and it succeeded, but it was the wrong ‘other side’.

It literally entered the ‘other side’ by getting its head ripped off in the spokes of my front wheel. A farmer who witnessed the scene came over laughing and I actually looked at him and said ‘why did the farking chicken cross the road!’  I offered him money to pay for the chicken but he was too busy ‘laughing his head off’ to even consider accepting it.

He picked it up, took it across the road, let it bleed out and then began plucking it.

So as I continued to ride I began to think about why the chicken actually crossed the road and the meaning of ‘to get to the other side’. Is it really just a simple riddle with a blunt answer because this chicken did actually make it to the ‘other side’, just not the other side of the road.

Maybe there is more to it than we have always thought?
So I thought I’d look up its origins and throw a blog together.

Anyhow, Cartoon Village is a tiny village about an hour’s ride from Dexing Town that has little cartoons painted on the walls of almost every home to remind the villagers of the do’s and don’ts in life. I’ve never seen anything like it and still remain unsure if it is a good thing or a bad thing that they need such to be reminded. But then again it could simply be a way to teach their children a little more about the rights and wrongs in life.

Not long after the ‘chicken incident’:

I ran into a group of children who literally stopped and stared at me like I was ET dropping in for a visit. After I said hello etc they began asking all the usual questions but the little girl with the Sheep on her top (see photos below) just continued to stare with wide eyed amazement. She could not take her eyes off me and when I moved she followed with both her feet and her stare and I honestly believe that she didn’t blink for about five minutes. It wasn’t until she heard me say where I was from that she came back to reality and then began jumping up and down laughing saying Australia and then raced off motioning for me to follow and she took me to a wall that had two kangaroos on it being chased by a tiger.

She then continued to jump up and down like a Kangaroo, laughing and yelling;
Australia Kangaroo, Australia Kangaroo, Australia Kangaroo.
Maybe she thought I was an actual kangaroo!

I soon found out how proud the children were of their cartoons and ‘Little Sheep’ then became the leader of the group and took me from wall to wall to show me each one. After an hour or so she/they then took me to the local store where we chowed down on tofu, dried fish and bamboo washed down with Chinese cola followed by icy poles. I visited Cartoon Village several times after but that was the only time I ever saw Little Sheep and most of her friends as most of my visits were on a Friday when they were at school.

THE ORIGINS OF THE CHICKEN CROSSING THE ROAD

‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ is a common riddle or joke.
The answer or punch line is: ‘To get to the other side.’

The riddle is an example of anti humour, in that the curious setup of the joke leads the listener to expect a traditional punch line, but they are instead given a simple statement of fact. ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ has become largely iconic as an exemplary generic joke to which most people know the answer and has been repeated and changed numerous times.

The first known printing of this riddle was in 1847 in The Knickerbocker, a New York City monthly magazine. There are ‘quips and quillets’ which seem actual conundrums, but yet are none. Of such is this: ‘Why does a chicken cross the street? Are you ‘out of town?’ Do you ‘give it up?’ Well, then: ‘Because it wants to get on the other side!’  The joke become widespread by the 1890s, when a variant version appeared in the magazine Potter's American Monthly:

Why should not a chicken cross the road?
It would be a fowl proceeding.

Does the chicken joke hint at something deeper and more gruesome than we ever imagined?   Are we foreseeing the chicken’s suicide? So ‘to get to the other side’ is really ‘to get to the other side’? As in death? The unknown mysterious place of the dead which is the opposite side to the place of the living? Here we can come up with many reasons why this chicken wanted to commit suicide, assuming that the analysis of the joke was correct.

What was the chicken depressed or angry about that she felt she needed to end her life?
Does this argument come down to the topic of animal abuse in the end?

Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

Here are some answers, in the spirit of various well known physicists,
To the age old question, why did the chicken cross the road?

Martin Luther King: I envision a day when chickens can cross roads without having their motives called into question.
Albert Einstein: The chicken did not cross the road. The road passed beneath the chicken.
Edwin Hubble: Strange, it seems to move faster the farther away it gets.
Isaac Newton: Chickens at rest tend to stay at rest. Chickens in motion tend to cross roads.
Galileo Galilei: The chicken crossed the road because it put one foot in front of the other and took a sufficient number of steps to traverse a distance greater than or equal to the road’s width. Note that the reason is not because the earth is the center of the universe. Oh, great… another jail term.
Carl Sagan: There are billions and billions of such chickens, crossing roads just like this one, all across the universe.
Ptolemy: Someone will probably think of a simpler explanation in a few thousand years, but the present understanding is that the chicken crosses the road because it is constrained to move on this here sphere, which in turn has its center on this one over here. The end result is that, except in the rare case of retrograde chicken motion, the chicken does indeed cross the road.
Stephen Hawking: Chicken fluctuations will inevitably create a scenario where a chicken ends up on the other side of the road.
David Hilbert: I was standing on the side of the road and a chicken came along, evidently in some kind of strange state. I informed it that it was nevertheless in my personal space, so it crossed the road.
John David Jackson: You’ll find out after you complete this 37-page calculation.
Richard Feynman: It’s all quite clear from this simple little diagram of a circle with lines poking out of it.
John Bell: Since there are no local hidden chickens, any hidden chickens you find must have come from far away. They therefore surely must have crossed at least one road on their way here.
Nicolaus Copernicus: The chicken was moving at a slightly different orbital speed around the sun.
Archimedes: I was running through the streets yelling and screaming and it was only afterward that I realised I was carrying a chicken.

Beers N Noodles toya…..shane
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The soundtrack to this entry was by Suicidal Chickens..oops, I mean Tendencies
The album was ‘How Will I Laugh Tomorrow’.....if a chicken dies today!
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