I always loved The Bloggess but now I bow down, snickering all the way.
http://thebloggess.com/2011/06/and-thats-why-you-should-learn-to-pick-your-battles/
Go, just read it already. And let that be a lesson to you menfolk, if you are uptight about buying bath towels… you may end up with a chicken you hadn’t counted on 🙂 .
Smarter Every Day – I haven’t seen all this guy’s videos so I can’t vouch for them all, but I have to say, I like how he approaches the science of everyday things and does these wacky experiments to create a feeling of wanting to keep learning more all the time. As last week’s post discussed, Jason has a magic ability to locate strange things on the Internet related to chickens, and Destin takes on the biomechanics of a Chicken Head.
In the second video, Destin then goes a bit further adding the powers of mad technology he had to create himself, in order to attain the world’s first Chicken-powered Steadicam!
There are many mysteries in marriage.
From the land Down Under…check out the Buckaroo Banzai epaulets and haircuts from another more innocent time. (Also the expressions on the live chickens in the rock video are pretty sweet.)
About.com can sometimes just be factual and helpful, and othertimes it just brings the cute overload. I won’t spoil the fun of the how-to article but I will note that you want kids doing this project to be at LEAST 5 years old, that it’s a good project to make use of those old-burned-out standard bulbs as you replace them with energy-efficient ones, and my gut tells me paper mache can only be helpful here. But anyway,go read the project, it’s darn cute.
Everyone who was once a kid knows about the “game of chicken.” Some folks may interpret recent events in Washington DC as a game of chicken.
In Seattle, chickens tend to bawk and peck at each other a lot, they do not drive cars forcing each other to swerve on the road. Nor do they worry about the national debt.
But if you want the nitty-gritty of academic game theory. the math-filled analysis of playing the game of chicken, check out this Minnesota Public Radio video analysis of what’s going on when folks collide and at least one is acting crazy.
I was charmed by this news article about a Chicken Flying Contest in Goodells, Michigan: “Gentle encouragement was often needed for the chicken to hop off the ladder, flutter its wings and float to the ground.”
And of course: “As an opener for the Chicken Flying Contest, children and adults each participated in respective “Chuck-A-Chicken” competitions. One by one, people threw a large stuffed chicken as far as they could across the entertainment tent, to the delight of spectators.”
Sometimes, especially in the summer, the egg-laying goes on overload. It takes a chicken about 25 hours to “process” and emit an egg, but the sunnier the days are, the closer to one egg per chicken per day you get.
Here, you see Jason, for the second time that day, scoring an egg off our trio of chickens. He had checked in the morning and got two, but acting on a hunch he went into the coop after we returned from dinner at a fine restaurant, and lo, Business Chicken had done some business.
Jason taunts chicken with egg
I know, I know – we have chickens, they are the right age, we can reasonably expect eggs. But after all the coop dragging and poop cleaning, I feel Jason earns the right to gloat over his prizes every so often. 🙂
I’ll admit I’m old enough that Super Chicken was way after my time watching Sesame Street or the Muppet Show. I find it comforting that chickens have their own super heroes and we can all share in the celebration of chicken super powers….
I have no idea who made this animation originally. I don’t know how the forum poster found it. But I gotta say, it sorta does look like Beyonce Chicken.
http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showpost.php?p=2774896&postcount=2955
Every so often, Jason sends me things he finds on the Web that possibly only a chicken lover would love or appreciate.
One recent find is from the UK company where we bought our coop – Omlet – a book that apparently reveals the truth of human-chicken relationships:
100 Ways for a Chicken to Train Its Humans
He also occasionally sends me info from the Backyard Chickens Forum – I can’t say they will have everything you need to know at any given time but they are active and cover a lot of basics.
I of course send him things too. Lately I happened upon a stuffed animal that had a corresponding book – Chicken Butt! (seen here posing next to My First Bacon for scale, and then alone below that).
Chickenbutt snuggles up to My First Bacon
And alone:
Chickenbutt with helpful tag (referring to his children's book)
But that book and butt is apparently not the only literary work based on a chicken’s back end… there is also Chicken Cheeks coming to a kindergarten near you (and not just talking about chicken hindquarters – other animals are apparently caught up in the plot).
I’m curious to know if other people keep running into chicken gear, or is it because I’m “chicken-sensitized” that this stuff keeps showing itself to me. 🙂
Business Chicken 