Once More With Footnotes Read Free Page B

chickens!"
     
                  When asked about the Assemblage, he said: "There was only this pile of junk in the middle of the bushes. It was just twigs and wire a nd junk. And eggs, only you never touch the eggs, we know that, some of those, eggs give you a shock, like electricity. 'Cos you never asked me before, that's why. Yeah, I kicked it over. Because there was this chicken inside it, okay, but when I went up c lose there was this flash and, like, a clap of thunder and it went all wavy and disappeared. I ain't taking that from no chicken."
     
                  Thus far we have been unable to reassemble the Assemblage (Photos A thru G). There is considerable doubt as to its function , and we have dismissed Mr. X's view that it was "a real funky microwave oven." It appeared simply to have been a collection of roadside debris and twigs, held together with cassette tape.* ( * "The Best of Queen." ) It may have had some religious significan ce. From drawings furnished by Mr. X, there appeared to have been space inside for one chicken at a time.
     
                  Document C contains an analysis of the three eggs found in the debris. As you will see, one of them seems normal but infertile, the second has been powering a flashlight bulb for two days, and a report on the third is contingent on our finding either it or Dr. Paperbuck, who was last seen trying to cut into it with a saw.
     
                  For the sake of completeness, please note Document B, which is an offprint of Paperbuck and Macklin's Western Science Journal paper. "Exaggerated Evolutionary Pressures on Small Isolated Groups Under Stress."
     
                  All that we can be certain of is that there are no chickens in the area where chickens have been for the last seventeen yea rs.
     
                  However, there are now forty-seven chickens on the opposite verge.
     
                  Why they crossed is of course one of the fundamental riddles of popular philosophy.
     
                  That is not, however, the problem.
     
                  We don't know how.
     
                  But it's not such a great verge over there, and they're all clustered together and some of the hens are laying.
     
                  We're just going to have to wait and see how they get back.
     
                  …
     
                  Cluck?
     
     
     
     
    Author's note: In 1973, a lorry overturned at a freeway interchange in Hollywood. It was one of th e busiest in the United States and, therefore, the world. Some chickens escaped and bred. They survived — are surviving — very well, even in the hazardous atmosphere of the roadside. But this story is about another Hollywood. And other chickens.

Three times s o far British universities have suffered short bouts of insanity during which they have awarded me honorary degrees as a Doctor of Letters.
     
    It's now a tradition that I return the compliment and some suitable member of the faculty gets a degree from Unseen University (plus a badge and rather nifty UU scarf). It gets a laugh and a picture in the papers and everyone seems to enjoy it. I used to do the oration in Latin, or the Discworld equivalent, which co-incidentally looks like very bad Latin, but it had t o be very bad indeed before most people "got it"; Jack Cohen at Warwick University got his for "habeum tonsorius per Alberto Einstineum."
     
    This one, from the happy day in Portsmouth, was how the English ones go.
     
     
     
     
D octor W ho?
     
                  Vice-chancellor, venerab le staff, guests, students, and graduates, I hope that no one will take it amiss when I say that what we are in fact doing today is celebrating ignorance. Ignorance is generally an unregarded talent among humans, but we are in fact the only animal that kn o ws how to do it properly. We've got where we are today