And Rightly So!

Why did the chicken cross the road?

Here uncensored (and unauthorized) are the collected replies of the management here at ARS:

Duncan

He heard me loading my M-4 and realized if he didn’t move out of range right away, he’d be my next dinner.

Raven

He was a dickless liberal wimp without any balls who decided to get out of the way because he knew he couldn’t handle an encounter with a real woman. If only he’d joined the Marines, he’d have learned how to be a man rooster instead of a capon. What’s the opposite of **THUD**…?

civil truth

That’s a very deep riddle that has puzzled the great philosophers down through the ages.

In the earliest known historical allusion, it was recorded that Aristotle posed this question to Archimedes at an alpha prayer breakfast. That same afternoon, while taking his daily bath, Archimedes in a flash of insight, leapt from his tub, and rushed through the streets of Syracuse towards Aristotle’s house, brandishing a sword and shouting Μολὼν λαβέ. Fortunately for the latter, the local gendarmerie arrived first and promptly hauled Archimedes off to a padded cell (after relieving him of possession of his weapon). After calming down a bit, Archimedes turned his attention to pondering how he could manage to displace the prison walls from his path (which later gave rise to his famous boast that he would move the earth if someone could provide him with a place to stand).

The great Roman philosopher Seneca, in response to the badgerings of his students, posted this famous quatrain as a response:

Obile heres ago,
Fortibus est in aro.
Nobile deis dux,
Summa causen, summa trux.

After these verses were brought to the attention of the Emperor Nero, Seneca received his just reward: an imperial sentence of death by poison.

Centuries later, when Voltaire was asked this question, he immediately leapt to his feet and shouted: Vivre libre ou mourir!, which historians have later memorialized as the opening salvo of the French Revolution.

Scholars have since spilled much ink (including at least eleven books and six Ph.D. theses) attempting to decipher the origins of this astounding declaration. However, recent unpublished memoires of Voltaire found at a yard sale in Yardley, Pennsylvania in 2005 have revealed a more pedestrian explanation: Voltaire, as he confessed later to his landlord, simply had misheard the question and thought that his wife was demanding that he put out the garbage across the street. Indeed, he was quite miffed that this phrase of his should have sparked the overthrow of the hated French monarchy, whereas his learned treatises had evoked scarcely a ripple on the lake of history.

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With all due to respect to the great masters who have gone before me, I would humbly reply:

Because he knew where his next meal was coming from.