Chickens

The Royal Winter Fair is on just now.  One of the things they have there is prize-winning chickens.  I wonder how judges choose the best chicken?  You'd think they'd eat them, then decide which one tastes best!  

I remember this cartoon You Were Never Duckier, where Daffy Duck was at some fair but the prize for best chicken was a lot bigger than for best duck, so he put a glove on his head Howie Mandel-style and pretended to be a chicken.  Of course he got carried off by Hennery the little chicken hawk and almost got eaten!

When I was at Mecklenburgh Square in London, England two decades ago, the nearby children's park of Coram's Fields had chickens, and I heard roosters crowing in the morning!

I wonder how farmers can tell when an egg is going to hatch?

This subject reminds me of a joke!  A woman comes to a doctor and says, "Can you help us?  My husband thinks he's a chicken!" The doctor says, "Really?  How long has be been that way?" "Six weeks." "Six weeks!  Why didn't you tell me before now?" "Well, I would have, but we needed the eggs."

It also reminds me of a story from the Actors Studio in the 1950s.  The actors were given an exercise where they pretended to be chickens in a coop that's about to have an A-bomb dropped on it.  Everyone else squawked around wildly, but Marlon Brando just sat down and pretended to lay an egg.  He explained, "A chicken doesn't understand anything about A-bombs!"

Also in the '50s you had the game of chicken.  When governments played chicken with A-bombs, it was called "brinksmanship"!

And there's this The Far Side cartoon where a farmers wife collects eggs from the henhouse, only to see a hen carrying a baby out of the farmhouse! (Another one features a "boneless chicken ranch"...)