9/14/2002: Live poultry

Last weeks MSNBC IotW offered up this. This is how you get your live birds to market in Burkina Faso, West Africa... by moped.

Where are their little seatbelts and tiny helmets?

Hey! at least they got one last ride before they were terminated.

If I were a chicken, I'd jump off the bike and run for my life.

Incidentally, seeing this picture brought back a dream I had last night where I thought I was cool because I was riding a motorcycle. This is incredibly odd, since I have no opinion on motorcycles and don't think they're cool at all.

Typical market day at Griffs. :)

Reminds me of the story about the guy who was sitting fishing by a country creek from a small bridge.

A fairly sizable truck pulls up to the bridge and stops. The driver gets out with a baseball bat, hammers with it rapidly on the side of the truck for a minute, hops back in.

He then drives halfway across the bridge, stops again, and repeats the treatment on the side of the truck, hops back in and drives t o opposite side.

The guy hails the driver and asks "What was all that about?"

The driver replies: "The weight limit on thebridge is two tons, and I've got three tons of chickens in this here truck..."

Poultry in motion.

Terribly sorry about that. I'm a slave to the voices in my head.

Originally posted by Bitman
Poultry in motion.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!

Wow, a response. Rare that I get one, especially one so .. informative. :violin: Anyway, my point is:

Originally posted by MaggieL
The driver replies: "The weight limit on thebridge is two tons, and I've got three tons of chickens in this here truck..."

"Arrr. The laws of physics be a harsh mistress." Even if chickens could fly, the truck would still weigh 5 tons. Or was that the point? Sorry, so many technical holes, it just didn't strike me funny.

Originally posted by Bitman
Even if chickens could fly, the truck would still weigh 5 tons. Or was that the point?

Um...of course we don't really know how much the truck weighed, from the information given...just that the <b>chickens</b> weighed three tons and the bridge limit was two. The point of the joke was the belief of the driver that keeping the chickens stirred up actually made the truck lighter.

It's a management theory used in corporate America entirely too often. They try to keep the chickens stirred up enough that no one will realize how close to collapse the bridge is.

Going along with that story is the Calivin and Hobbes strip in which Calvin sees a "Weight Limit: 2 tons" sign and asks his dad how they figure out the limit. Dad tells him they keep driving heavier trucks across the bridge untill it collapses, and then build a new bridge exactly like the old one.

"Any fool can build a bridge that will stand, but it takes
an engineer to build a bridge that will *barely* stand."

Dependability Motto: Anyone can build something that works when it works. But it's how it works when it doesn't work that counts.