Collage 144               H u m o u r N e t               26 SEP 95

Recently, Jimmy Hoffa announced his candidacy for leadership of the
Teamsters Union--the organization which seeks to ensure that the
average American laborer is paid at least three times what he's worth,
so that unskilled laborers in developing countries can have a wider
selection of employment opportunities.

Anyway, *this* Jimmy is the son of the *other* Jimmy Hoffa--the
Teamsters leader who mysteriously (and permanently) disappeared many
years ago, and was recently rumored to have been buried (probably
unceremoniously) in the end zone at Giants stadium in New Jersey. Now
Jimmy Jr. has decided to run for the same post as the one his father
held at the time of his disappearance.

In response to the news, the state of New Jersey announced plans to
build an even larger stadium at or near the Meadowlands. An
alternative plan involves the widening of the New Jersey Turnpike.

Speaking of roadways, Randy (from SpaceNet) provides us with some
expert assistance in answering the eternal question, "Why Did The
Chicken Cross The Road?" And Matt (also from SpaceNet) serves up an
improved version of the common chain letter (typically circulating
through snail mail, but turning up more and more in e-mail these
days). Many thanks to Randy and Matt, and the rest of the SpaceNet
crowd.

Enjoy!

- Vince Sabio
  HumourNet Moderator
  HumourNet@telephonet.com
____________________________________________________________________
          Opener (above) Copyright 1995 by Vincent Sabio
  Permission is hereby granted to forward or post this "Collage";
  please observe the guidelines stated at the end of the message.
____________________________________________________________________

SUBJ Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road?

Plato:
For the greater good.

Karl Marx:
It was an historical inevitability.

Machiavelli:
So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken
that 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.

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

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 sapien 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.

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?

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.

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

SUBJ: An Improved Chain Letter

YOU WILL EXPERIENCE GREAT SEX within four days of receiving this
letter, provided you send it on. Since the copy must tour the
world, you must make ten copies and send them to others. This is no
joke. Send no money. Send copies to people who need to GET LAID
within 96 hours.

After he passed this letter on, a Montana Spinach Control Officer
got his penis stuck in a cow-milking machine and had the longest
series of orgasms of his life. John Elliot tried to pick up a
prostitute, but, because he broke the chain, was picked up by the
police instead. When they searched his home, they found magazines
of little boys which they showed to his neighbors. In a suburb of
Paris, Don Loray's trousers were ripped by an unsatisfied erection,
51 days after failing to circulate the letter. However, before this
happened, a condom machine gave him three condoms for the price of
one. (was this the consolation prize?)

Do note the following: Hebert Pudstrom received the chain in 1953.
He asked his secretary to make ten copies and send them out. A few
days later he encountered her in a red-light district making more
than he had every paid her at work. General George Patton, who sent
the letter on, saw what he thought was a quarter in the street.
When he bent down to pick it up, a beautiful woman in a miniskirt
walked by, and he got a great view.

Heywood Daddit, an unemployed chicken choker, received the letter
and forgot that it had to leave his hands within 96 hours. His wife
then went bowling with his best friend and never returned. Later,
after finding the letter again, he mailed ten copies. A few days
later he got a wife and discovered that his old wife, who he thought
was wonderful, had made love to him like a dead salmon for all these
years! Alan Fairchild received the letter and, not believing, threw
the letter away. Nine days later he spilled hot coffee in his
crotch.

In 1987 the letter received by a young woman in Texas was faded and
barely readable, so she did not realize that this paragraph applied
to her. She promised herself she would retype the letter and send
it on, but she put it aside to do later. She was plagued with
problems including herpes and other venereal diseases she contracted
in her futile attempts to find Mr. Right in a singles bar. The
letter did not leave her hands in 96 hours. She finally typed the
letter and found a man with a 10-inch penis.

Beware, however of the fate of the E-mail user at Trent University,
Peterborough, ONT, that sent this letter to himself over five
thousand times in one afternoon. Before leaving the computer lab a
strange woman came up behind him, bit his ear and put her hand down
his pants. The ensuing surprise caused him to stumble forward and
cry out. As he attempted to arrest his fall by grabbing a nearby
PC, a gob of spittle that had been flung from his mouth (as he cried
out) landed deep into the inner recesses of the computer, all three
(student, strange woman and computer) then experienced simultaneous
Cyber-Orgasms of exponential intensity before exploding in a puff of
smoking data.

You must distribute at least ten copies within 96 hours of receiving
this letter. Those who do will find their love lives more fulfilling.
Those who do not will be doomed to one-night stands with mechanical
devices.

(Editor's Note: Don't bother, Brett--you're already doomed to one-
night stands with mechanical devices. Oh, and I'd like to take this
opportunity to formally apologize for the "bisexual" reference made
about Brett in the Collage 142--I had mistakenly assumed that
"bisexual" meant having sex with two different kinds of farm animals
in the same evening. I stand corrected. </vs>)

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