Monday, March 3, 2008

Why did the chicken cross the road? iraq edition

Bruce Sterling's posted a compendium of "why did the chicken cross the road?" jokes on Wired.com. His twist? It's an Iraqi chicken so everything's got a logistics-of-conflict bent in this list of answers based on various points-of-view.

My favorite of them all (showing my love of linguistics) is: "Translators: Chicken he cross street because bad she tangle regulation. Future chicken table against my request. 
"

There's something on the list sure to amuse everyone (set your political correctness threshold on high) so read and cluck and chuckle

3 comments:

Jennifer said...

Hi there,
I've read the history of your chicken adventure and it's getting me excited about our own chicken plans. My daughters are familiar with chicken handling from their preschool and have been begging us to get chickens at home. My husband and I are doing all the research and that's how we came across your blog. I have just a few questions:

1) Did you talk to your neighbors before you got chickens to let them know and/or bribe them? Chickens are legal here in Campbell too, but I wondered if we owed our neighbors a heads-up.

2) Is there chicken poop all over your yard? We'll have an official chicken coop area that is 11 x 11 (Eglu within this space), but in addition to that plan to let the little gals have some free range time (eating those pesty bugs). We don't know how much poop to expect around the yard, especially concerned for the concrete areas near our swimming pool where stepping into a pile of plop in bare feet seems really... unpleasant. Maybe the chickens would avoid the concrete patio and stick to the dirt, mulched, garden sections since that's where all the goodies are located? One hopes.

3) Did the chickens eat up plants you wished they hadn't?

Looking forward to your response,
Jen

Unknown said...

Hi Jen, glad to hear you've found the blog useful, and I'm psyched to hear you're bringing urban chickens to Campbell. (We used to live over by Bascom and Union... near Cosentinos and boy do we miss Cosentino's produce and meat sections!) What color Eglu did you get?

As to your questions:
1) No, we didn't talk to our neighbors beforehand, but we did tell them once we'd gotten our chicks and before we established them outdoors. We've got pretty good relations with our neighbors, and I guess I took it for granted they'd be fine with our decision to have chooks in our backyard.

2) I'm sure there is poop all around the yard, but we don't really notice it. We've got a patio in the back and a flagstone path, and we'll see poop on each of them every once in a while, but the girls don't spend much time at all on the hard stuff and prefer to be on the earth/grass looking for bugs and weeds. So your hunch that they'd avoid the concrete's a good one (although they likely won't keep it completely clean).

3) I've heard chickens are rather indiscriminate in munching on plants, so I made sure to surround our garden with chicken fencing to keep the girls out, just in case. We didn't have any problems with them going after treasured plants last summer, but your mileage may vary. I'm going to be sure to fence up our garden again until the plants get big enough to withstand a good thrashing by the girls looking for bugs around their roots.

Be sure to send a link to your blog so I can follow along once your chickens arrive!

Jennifer said...

Thanks Thomas! These are very helpful answers! Ahhh blogging. I mean to do it every once in a while then I get distracted/busy/insert usual excuses here. Maybe a journal for the chicken experiment will be a good motivator to get serious about it. I'd like to blog to journal for my kids too, they are growing so fast! They say cute things, do cute things, I don't want to forget these special moments.

The PLAN is we will have a blue eglu, it's actually not a done deal yet. We're doing a lot of research since this is a big commitment, but I told Geoff (my husband) the only way I feel like the cleanup could be simple for our lives is to go with the Eglu coop. I've read nothing but good things about it! Blue or green are both nice. I'm actually open on color.

Thanks again for your responses!
Jen

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