Thursday, October 21, 2004

More chicken scratching

I've been meaning to post on this one since August, when I dropped a little hint about it. But it seems that I piqued absolutely no one's curiosity, and then other things came up, and I kind of forgot about it for a while. Anyway, the Chicken Farmers of Ontario sent Mrs. Ruddy Ruddy another issue of Wing magazine.

Now, the last issue of this purportedly semiannual (or biannual, if you prefer) publication was supposedly #2. So how is it that this one says on the cover that it's "Number 12 in a Series" even though the accompanying letter says it's indeed #3? Perhaps the fowl afficionados behind this publication have taken that old adage about not counting your chickens to a whole new level, and are simply making wild-ass guesses whenever it's time to come up with any numbers.

The letter urged me to check out the Ontario Chicken Lover website, as they've added several "new" areas. (The quotation marks are theirs. Maybe they're ironic, and these areas aren't really new.) So I checked it out, and was surprised to see that there's a members-only section. Not just anybody is allowed to love a chicken, it seems.

(As a side note, if you Google "chicken lover", you'll find a site called "Confessions of a Chicken Lover". Judging by this picture of Zoe, the girl who runs it, a chicken could really do much worse. The chicken-loving scene from Pink Flamingos comes to mind, for instance.)

Fortunately, when I checked the letter again, it turned out I already have a password to the members-only section. And although I'm probably not supposed to divulge this information to the general public, I'm sure it's okay if I share my password with my Ruddy Buddies. It's wing. Imagine the odds that I, of all the people who got a copy of Wing magazine, would get that particular easy-to-remember password!

The reverse of the letter featured a survey that I could have filled out to enter a contest, but I'm not bothering with that, as the only thing featured in the members area is a list of the contest winners. So there's nothing in it for me now. But I'm heartbroken because I could have had a George Foreman Countertop Rotisserie that would allow me to "roast up to 2 chickens at once". I wonder, though: Is that the best way of phrasing it? At any given time, you can use this machine to roast zero, one, or two chickens. However, you cannot roast zero chickens at once (i.e., simultaneously), nor can you roast one chicken at once. So there's no need to establish an upward boundary of the number of chickens you can roast at once if the only possible number is two. You could just as accurately say that you can roast as few as two chickens at once.

Anyway, all the quibbling about the writing aside, I do like the picture accompanying the recipe for "Dancing Beer Can Chicken" inside the magazine. I'll be damned if that thing doesn't look like it's dancing! Of course, if someone shoved something with the girth of a beer can up my rear end and made me stand on a hot grill, I'd be dancing too.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

aw, Pet. You piqued my curiosity. I was just too polite to say so.

- Dr Jr

5:15 AM  

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