I assume chickens can get down by themselves.
They can, but I am a bit amazed that it got up there in the first place, unless this is a very small tree.
It's a decently big pecan tree - she must be twenty feet up? High enough that I couldn't get a good photo.
You can tell the article is satire because it says you can freeze bread without hurting quality.
The chicken crossed the road to avoid paparazzi.
I don't usually stock-up on bread and milk before a snowstorm because I can walk to the grocery store from my house. I do stock up on meat and produce because the grocery store I can walk to is a shitty one with bad produce and the meat counter doesn't always smell that good.
A chicken 20 feet up in a tree? Have you had a tornado recently? Student prank? Something else disguised as a chicken?
Pecan trees, at least those I recall seeing, have branches starting fairly low to the ground. I don't think a chicken can get 20 feet up by flying, but they could go from branch to branch in little jumps.
She seems to have gotten down and disappeared. But yeah, she was roof-height, and our house is up on stilts.
7 is right. The branches start maybe four feet off the ground and are pretty dense.
That aurora story I linked on FB better not be fake.
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Well, uh, maybe it's just a change of climate
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Chickens fly perfectly well over short distances -- farmers clip their wings to keep them on the ground. Buck raised chickens a boy, and also had a chicken-killing dog. After the first year, he learned not to clip their wings so they could go arboreal if Sam got loose. Apparently worked fine.
Buck raised chickens as a boy
Not to fly up trees - that is the Law. Are we not Boys?
I have seen with my own eyes a chicken fly (is it really flying if it's not sustained?) up about fifteen feet into a tree. Our neighbors keep chickens, and they seem to have far more loft than I had believed. I'm surprised they don't fly away - I'd always believed that it was possible to keep chickens in the city because they basically couldn't fly over the fence.
I think if you keep feeding them, they stay. Like cats, but less pointless.
I have seen with my own eyes a chicken fly (is it really flying if it's not sustained?) up about fifteen feet into a tree.
Unless the chicken had grasshopper-like legs that gave it a fifteen-foot vertical leap, I'd say it qualifies as flying.
The real question is, would a chicken with grasshopper-like legs still taste like chicken?
That was my impression of Buck's chickens. On the one hand, intermittent savage attacks by a slavering mastiff/St. Bernard mutt. On the other hand, regular servings of corn, and all the tomato-worms you could pick out of the garden. Might as well stick around.
And also, you can keep them earthbound by clipping the flight feathers.
We had a chicken. She could take a pebble from your hand.
I have seen with my own eyes a chicken fly (is it really flying if it's not sustained?) up about fifteen feet into a tree.
All these moments will be lost in time like tears in rain.
She could take a pebble from your hand.
And then put said pebble and a succession of similarly-offered pebbles into a half-full bottle of water, thereby raising the water level so that she could drink it?
On the OP, you have to read pretty far into the article, but this is pretty obviously not something an actual FDA spokesthey would say:
"Don't be a part of the Snowpocolypse, it's a dangerous battlefield of crazed-shopping, winter-bitten weather zombies."
Also, here are some "three guys walk into a bar" jokes:
http://www.karlremarks.com/p/three-dictators-walk-into-bar.html
So three Jordanians walk into a bar. The king removes the Prime Minister & dissolves the parliament. That's how all stories finish in Jordan.
23: given the full paragraph, I think it sounds like how people talk:
"We are encouraging that you go out and purchase bulk amounts of dry, powdered milk which can be stored in your cupboards. This will prevent frantic trips to grocery stores and super markets as the onslaught of storms begin to fall upon your respected region." Miller said. "As far as bread, we suggest you buy as much as you can efficiently store in your freezer. Bread can be frozen and thawed without compromising the integrity of its quality. Preparations such as these are crucial and the fact that technology has brought us to a time and place in which such events can be predicted is quite remarkable. So stock up on your powdered milk and fill your freezer with loaves of bread, because once the blankets of snow begin to fall, brave souls will confront the elements to raid stores of these products like some sort of scavenger hunt. Don't be a part of the Snowpocolypse, it's a dangerous battlefield of crazed-shopping, winter-bitten weather zombies."
"As God is my witness, I thought chickens could fly."
A high school girlfriend lived on a farm in eastern NC and on one visit, as Glob is my witness, I saw a chicken walk up the side of a tree. When I expressed amazement to M, she shrugged and said "Yeah, they're hybrids." I didn't follow up on it because she replied so matter-of-factly that I thought I must have said something stupid.
"General Hood, when your Texans are here all the chickens have to roost high," attributed to Robert E. Lee.
The turkeys raised in Bresse are particularly rare in part because it is such a pain in the butt to get them out of the trees each night in order to coop them up. Or at least that was what a turkey farmer in Bresse told me.
26 - it's not how people in news stories talk. A real news story would have cut the quote off after "efficiently store in your freezer." (And then probably cut back in for "snowpocalypse," because crazy.)
28: Gas-electric chickens are amazing.
Absent any actual satire, or really any humor value at all, fake news stories like that amount to nothing more than "Hey, look over there! . . . Ha! Made you look!"
...you can expect to multiply that number by up to five, ten, maybe even twenty times in some areas. In the worst zones, you could see 50 times the amount of snow you've had in the past.
is just absurd, as is the idea that the NWS would ever say there was a 99% chance of anything.
I think the real problem is that the article fails to follow proper inverted pyramid style; the headline is fairly plausible, and it gets more jokey as it goes on.
The joke in the OP is that there's a Washington Post writer telling people not to get too excited about the weather. Ha ha!
28: hybridised with geckoes.
It's only stuck in a tree, not in space.
At a glance it was "Senior Administrator of Meteorologists" that stood out for me. But of course I was already conditioned by heebie's spoiler.
31: It is how they write the news in local news and poorly written articles. Not how they talk in any big regional or national publication. It's just a marker of shitty reporting, not a marker of satire.
I'm a bit eager for a snowy winter. I probably won't think the same in February, but I'm ready for the first snow. The local joke here is that when the forecast calls for snow, people clear the stores out of bread, milk, and toilet paper. People are afraid of being trapped and unable to poop neatly.
Anyway, if there's so much snow that you can't leave the house to buy TP, you've probably got enough time to just hop in the shower (or full-body bidet) after you poop.
37 The geckoes all died because they kept fucking that chicken.
I'm down for a snowy winter. Bring it.
39 - I am pretty certain I read many more local news stories than you do, and no, they don't let people ramble on like that in their quotes. Sure, it could just be an unusually poorly written news story instead of a poorly written satire.
I am pretty certain I read many more local news stories than you do,
What on earth, are you an aggregator or something? What makes you think you've cornered the market on shitty local news?
~50% of recent Snopes postings have been responding to Empire News, which makes me regret putting Snopes in my RSS reader.
48 - I write the chicken dinner news for a nonprofit/membership organization & end up reading local stories to fill in details about random charitable foundations. I probably also look at a lot more elementary school websites than you do.
But it's totally okay that you fell for that story.
I write the chicken dinner news
BREAKING NEWS: RUSSIAN DRESSING EDGES TOWARDS CHICKEN KIEV.
49. That's sad. I am on the emailing list of some right-wing crazies (don't ask), and most of its emails are just the n-millionth re-forwarding of stuff Snopes (and other urban legend sites) debunked years ago.
They've taken to forwarding but including the addition, "Don't trust Snopes!" (Apparently Snopes is funded by George Soros and the Mikkelsons are commies or even Democrats.) Epistemic closure FTW!
Empire News seems to be remarkably badly-written satire. I recall seeing a couple of their other articles taken for truth in the past.
I was talking to my mom on Sunday when she decided to Google what this winter would be like. She found this article and started telling me about it, and asked how one would pronounced "Scvediok". I said "huh, I've never heard of any name that resembles that, and can't even guess what nationality it is--I'll Google it". So I did, and all the hits were different versions of this article on different websites. But that still left open the possibility that they just kept misspelling the guy's name. So we Googled the other names in the article and those people didn't seem to exist, and we concluded it was fake, but were left confused about who would write a fake article like this. "Satire" didn't even occur to us because it wasn't funny.
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I can't help but wonder if the Guardian is gesturing, subtly, in the direction of their preferred outcome of the Scottish independence vote...
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Elephant polo?! I didn't know that was even a thing.
And what a douche. "No, the photo has to show my watch, my cufflinks, and my pinky ring!" (Although the photo would have a similar aesthetic effect even without the accessories.)
I didn't know they could marry either.
But what will the Scottish Peer who controls a legal private army do if the Yes vote wins? (Surely they've been a plot point in a military thriller.)
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Attempted thread-jack:
I was surprised to see that "All About That Bass" reached #1 on the charts this week.
I feel confused. The first time I saw a link to the video I thought, "that seems well-calibrated to be an internet hit" but I never thought that it would be dominating top-40 radio.
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Is it about butts? I thought all hit songs are about butts these days.
60: Am I wrong that a duke is properly addressed by the name of his duchy? So, for example, the Duke of Denver would be called "Denver"?
If I've got this straight, that's a terribly unfortunate title the poor man has.
"Generally speaking, our Hot 100 formula targets a ratio of sales (35-45%), airplay (30-40%) and streaming (20-30%)."
http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/ask-billboard/5740625/ask-billboard-how-does-the-hot-100-work
So, a song doesn't need to dominate top-40 radio to reach #1.
63 took me a second, then I laughed and laughed.
61: Why not? It is catchy.
62: Contains the lines "Boys like a little more booty to hold at night" and "I'm bringing booty back." It is entirely about butts.
So, a song doesn't need to dominate top-40 radio to reach #1.
The linked article quotes somebody noting, "But if they listen to Top 40 radio, they will hear "All About That Bass," which will soon dethrone Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" as the Hot 100's reigning champ. "
61: Why not? It is catchy.
Indeed, I feel out of touch.
63: That might be a practice that exists, but the proper form of address would be "Your Grace" or "Duke," if Wikipedia's to be believed (IWTBB).
63: Heh. I think that's one such way of doing things, but everything's slightly different in Scotland.
But he's actually South African. And we all know how much South Africans love mercenaries so really why has this novel not been written yet? Scotland splits up the UK, a rogue South African warlord-Duke takes it over with his legal private army--and he's secretly replaced all the pipers with Afrikaaner mercenaries who are veterans of various post-colonial African wars. "Oh, don't mind me, just arming them for the Military Tattoo, as I am wont to do." He then takes control of the rUK's nuclear deterrent that the new Scottish government hasn't yet had time to remove from the Clyde. It just writes itself.
Of course in historicals they're always going "My dear Gloucester".
I think you may be missing the point.
67: The boyfriend has been hearing it in heavy rotation on his drive to and from work. The first time, he came home and found the video because he (a) was curious what the vocalist looked like and (b) thought he'd hallicinated the Sexyback callback. (He doesn't actually like the song.)
66.2: No, no, also about fat-shaming! And my children predictably know many of the words already because they listen to pop radio at afterschool program. Nia asked to watch Baby Got Back again after I showed them the first 30 seconds or so and I said no, because I want them to end up with people who value them for reasons other than their butts and then we brainstormed ridiculous examples of what those could be.
I did watch the Bass video when it first started getting shared by everyone on youtube and didn't make it all the way through, so I hope it's not like Call Me Maybe where there's some shocking twist. Mostly I was trying to remember the name of the puppet singing group on Between the Lions (The Vowelles, it seems) who did the wig-and-lips look in a way that was less racially creepy than hers.
73.1 should have been "skinny-shaming," though "skinny bitches" sounds like "skinny ----es," which at least lets me imagine the aural equivalent of Victorian sanitizing.
There's one song where a guy sings that a particular booty don't need explaining. Which made me wonder how you categorize booties by degree of explicability and if it's categorical or continuous.
75 is Jason Derulo's Talk Dirty, and that line follows something about how he doesn't speak the language but her booty doesn't need explainin', by which point I've already changed the channel if I'm anywhere close at all.
He's saying that he doesn't understand the speech of booty? He means farting, right?
and thus does Athol live up to the nickname "Tool Town".
Which reminds me of the joke about how Governor Peabody of Massachusetts had three towns named after him: Peabody, Marblehead, and Athol.
The song is super catchy, but the skinny-shaming part annoying.
ALSO PERSONAL GRIPE: no one ever has sympathy for us awkwardly shaped apple-shaped non-skinny people. Not being skinny does not necessarily mean you're a voluptuous hourglass.
I write the chicken dinner news for a nonprofit/membership organization & end up reading local stories to fill in details about random charitable foundations. I probably also look at a lot more elementary school websites than you do.
Whatever. You couldn't rape a waffle.
Booties exist that do not need explication and that do need sympathy. Is this two dimensions or the opposite ends of a scale?
It doesn't seem you need encouragement, but while I can't speak for anybody else, I'm enjoying this, Moby.
63:Too bad his first name isn't Max.
Moby, you should follow in the footsteps of Standpipe and start a booty-explaining blog.
88: I got the impression he was working on a statistical analysis which he was hoping to publish in Nature.
I need a random sample of butts first.
You can randomize them after they're enrolled, can't you?
I wasn't thinking of an elemental design.
I thought peep said you were taking a bunch of impressions.
Oh man, what a great topic for a post. Shall we save it for Monday? Booty does taste best on a Monday, does it not?
94: Modern Love? Vows? Dining & Wine? So many possibilities.
Really, none of you know these classic Sesame Street song?
That should be a this, not a these. However here is another Sesame Street classic from the same era. "I'm a baby (Rock Me)."
I spent about 20 seconds trying to figure out how the Sesame Street writers had worked in a reference to analingus before I gave up.
Sorry, I should have said, OP. I am sure such a reference can be found, hidden deep in the muppet archives, however.
It's right there in the Sesame Street cookbook.. Grover tosses a salad, to Betty Lou's dismay. Or so she says.
Don't even ask what "Oscar's Sardine Specialties" are.
Thomas Friedman writes about how his recent analingus session with a Hong Kong taxi driver is a metaphor for America's changing economic relationship with the Pacific rim.
105: To say nothing of "The Count's Twenty is Plenty Long".
