How the Chicken Escaped

July 26, 1997--The spherical chicken, a purely hypothetical animal, was safely at home on the hard drive of Aaron Plikt's <aaronplikt@geocities.com> computer when disaster struck.  Aaron, firing up the machine one night for yet another round of tests on the animal, opened the virtual chicken coop to find that the chicken was gone.  It took several minutes running up and down the streets screaming, and at least one desparate letter to the Orson Scott Card mailing list to track down the culprit.  The chicken-napper turned out to be a new breed of criminal for the nineties:  a hypothetical chicken bandit.

This thief was no ordinary thief.  Not only had he managed to break into the chicken coop, but he had replaced the (purely hypothetical) roughly spherical chicken with a (purely hypothetical) decoy.  Left in the coop with the hypothetical decoy was a note with one line:

GONE BOWLIN' WITH THE BIRD.  YOU WANT 'IM BACK, IT'S GONNA COST YA.

Frantic scientists at Stanford sent phone calls out to the police, who sent out an immediate APB.  By 5:00 p. m., the HSPCIA (Hypothetical Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Imaginary Animals) had begun pursuit of the dreaded hypothetical chicken bandit.  It was around 7:00 that evening when the bandit was tracked down at a local "Bowlerama." The virtual thief was caught red-handed with roughly spherical feathers on his score card and chicken feed falling out of a hole in the back pocket of his blue jeans.  He was dragged away kicking and screaming, and despite Plikt's persistent questioning and persuasion, the bandit could only say, "I can't help it!  He never came back from the BALL RETURN!"

Upon close inspection of the lane's ball return, which now clearly read, "TILT," spherical feathers were found stuck oddly up and down the walls.  Some were starting to clog the machinery, but the majority of them were to be found squeezed into a crack in the wall about 3 inches wide.  The wall with the fissure proved to lead directly into a corridor that lead outdoors.

No one knows exactly how the chicken escaped, but HSPCIA chicken sighters everywhere are on the case.  Last reported, the chicken was seen rolling up and down highway U-150 in the Uinta Mountains....
 
 

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