St. Valentine’s Day Soup for the Cannibal Chicken’s Soul

31 01 2008

Love is more-than-normally complicated for the perplexed chicken with a taste for… chicken, and the people who love them.

Cannibal chickens have mixed feelings about their double yearnings — for romantic love with another chicken on the one hand and for the gastronomic satisfaction of a barbecued breast and drumstick on the other. 

What with eating other chickens a real taboo among chickens, cannibal chickens typically must limit their romantic interest to other cannibal chickens.  This concentration of cannibal-chicken clans only serves to further distort their dietary freakishness, leading to a potential powder keg of Kentucky-fried cravings.

(Or at least so at my house.)

Anyway, until recently Valentine’s Day was a fairly lonesome affair for many a cannibal chicken who had no means of meeting other cannibal chickens for conversation, sex, or anything in between.  Until now.  Thanks to the Internet, cannibal chickens are making community like never before, on-line and off. 

Today, cannibal chicken raves and speak-easy-style singles bars (known as cluck-easy’s) are increasingly common in more chicken-dense counties.  Any fowl expert will tell you, these bird-eating birds are hooking up, hitching up, and hatching up more… cannibal chickens.

Coming up on Bad Apple in February, you’ll want to stay tuned for our super-sexy Valentines Day feature all about how some lucky cannibal chickens will be spending their V-Day at the most romantic chicken-roast for chickens you can possible imagine.  (Images of hot crackling chicken over a blazing fire and a room of revelling chicken couples toasting to romance and the growing underground cannibal-chicken-restaurant industry).

Then we’ll follow one couple out to a night of partying and dancing, including the first reports ever from inside San Francisco’s hippest cluck-easy’s.

Remember, Bad Apple is the only media outlet that provides any coverage of cannibal chickens, or that even admits they exist.

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More future stories in the works:

What it Means to Love a Cannibal Chicken.

Cannibal Chicken Graft Gangs: Community Success Strategies.

To Dress or Not to Dress Your Cannibal Chicken, 5 FAQs

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     Want more now?

Visit the original Chicken Soup for the Cannibal Chicken’s Soul book announcement that started it all. 

Visit all Bad Apple stories that mention the Cannibal Chickens.

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Seven Habits of Highly-Effective Hitlers

28 01 2008

Not every Hitler gets to take-over his own country.  Most have to be satisfied with dominating only the people they know and come into contact with everyday.  But that doesn’t stop you from becoming the most-effective Hitler you can be , if you just believe in yourself to the exclusion of all others! 

Here’s a plan to keep even the most-self-conscious facist on track:

Habit One: Maintain Your Power:  You have to keep power to get power, if you know what I mean.  You must never doubt yourself.  Critics aren’t just wrong, they’re Satan!  Never waiver on your path to total domination.  If you hear a little voice in your head questioning Habit One, clobber it.

Habit Two: Find Your Subjects:  Whether you plan to take-over your native country and spread your evil genicidal rot from there, or if you just want to rule your own little nuclear family with an iron fist, forming your children into messed-up and highly-ineffective adults — or something in between –  whatever your plan is, you need someone to dominate right now.  If a coup is out of the question, consider starting a family, or even getting a job in management.

Habit Three: Stay in Your Insanity Zone: We all know, a little crazy goes a long way.   A little crazy is charismatic, a bit more is convenient as well, at times when your subjects attempt to use reason on you.  But when you go too far into crazy, we’ve all seen what happens.  You lose it, and become a Highly-Ineffective Hitler.   This is a big no-no.  You must find the proper level of insanity and stick with it!

Habit Four: Locate Your Leni Riefenstahl:  A great Hitler needs to pair up with someone who can make him feel and look like a god.  Whether this be your presidential spokesperson or your tan-salon specialist, I cannot stress how important it is to locate top talent to keep your legend lookin’ good. 

Well, that’s enough for today.  Perhaps you have a Habit to share that you have gleaned from the most-effective Hitlers in your midst.  You might be surprised how much you know and are willing to share about how to be an effective Hitler.





You’re always finding out who You is, all the time.

25 01 2008

Not to get too philosophical on you, but sometimes we all need a proverbial shot in the ass, don’t you think?  A curative prick of vitamin real, anything to remind us that in the great opera of life everyone gets only one chance to sing their swan song and get it right.

It’s like life is a mini-series and you are the co-writer, star and costume design.  You get absolutely no rehearsal; There will be no editing.  It’s all up to you whether you create a captivating tale, performed to perfection, or a dull reel, destined for the dust bin of eternity.  No pressures, mate — we all know that paralytic fear is anathema to a good life well-lived.

To complicate matters, you also must constantly play an extra in everyone else’s life-mini-series, plural.  You have a few larger roles, as well, sometimes playing the spouse, the friend, the co-worker, the boss, the employee, the customer, etc.  Look at all the parts you have to play!  You never are given any lines.  You must completely improvise based on this character you have been assigned and co-created with the universe, a character I will simply call ”You.”

And who is this You?  Well, sometimes it seems You could be anybody.  Other times, this You character appears overly determined by the situation You was handed, i.e. the script.  In reality, You is fluid and contradictory.  You are always finding out who You is, all the time.  Mostly it’s a hit or miss thing.  You try something, something changes, and you see if You is happy or not.  Often, You’s most unhappiest moments are the clearest indication to you of what this You person really wants.  (This is where that proverbial shot in the ass comes in handy, as well.)

My relationship to my own You character, which I will call “Me,” can be closely compared to a computer game I used to have where you get to plan your own Roman empire from scratch.  You start by creating a city, and you have to decide how many temples versus how many city walls to build.  Because if you don’t manage to keep your people happy with temples and stuff they riot and tear everything up, and if you don’t build enough walls the invaders come and tear everything up anyway. 

That’s Me, all over.  I keep putting up temples and walls, trying to make this insatiable Me person happy, secure, and not tearing shit up, figuratively speaking.  I haven’t managed to get past the city level, in the game or life, in part because I can never figure out how to collect enough taxes to satisfy and/or fend off the various external and internal angry mobs/Me’s.  If only I thought I could buy Me off as easily as my virtual Roman citizens, I would know what to devote myself to — more money for more temples and walls, of course. 

But alas, in the game of life, money buys nearly everything else, but we all know there’s no shopping for lasting happiness.  That you have to work for, and it doesn’t really come very easily much of time.  It’s a moving target. 

So in the end, I suppose what I’m finally saying here is that life is a great kill-less hunt for happiness and self-discovery.  And I for one am stringing my bow and otherwise preparing for the next season in the great happiness hunt slash mini-series episode starring Me.  Only, I hope I don’t accidentally hit anybody with this thing, there are an awful lot of extras hanging about on my happiness hunting grounds. 





Send Me Your Xanax

18 01 2008

We live in an anxious age, in case you haven’t already been freaking out about it yourself.  Why, if someone gives me one more thing to torment myself about, I think I will have located my sanity’s 100th monkey, the one who’s going to pound out Macbeth on a funky old type-writer of my last nerve.

I used to be able to drink coffee with impunity, but today it’s like fingernails on my deepest darkest innermost chalk board.  My mouth, formerly a semi-useful body part, now seems to run around and get me in all kind of trouble.  Can’t I just shut up?

Times like this, I see how they can sell a lobotomy. Come on, Doc, just turn this creep in my brain off, please!

What I need is an eye lid to shut over my own rancid thoughts.  What I get is a creative impulse to share all with you, my readers.  Something tells me you’ll understand.   





Signs of Our Time

17 01 2008

“Submission Accomplished”
-homemade bumpersticker #1.

“Proud parent of a turn indicator user”
-homemade bumpersticker #2.

Loud religious debate overheard on the street at lunch today:
“That would be in the Bible: Have you read the motherfucker?”

Finally, overheard in the office moments ago:
“The human body is like 110 percent water.”

 Got any similarly-wonderful signs-of-our-time to share?  
Oh come on, I know you do, so give um up!





We Secretly Replaced the World’s Democracies with Folger’s Crystal Coffee

13 01 2008

And no one noticed the difference!

Citizens the world round are delighted by Folgers Crystals instant coffee in place of the usual, slow-brewed democracy. In polls people prefer it 20 to one.

Here’s a few responses from customers who were pleasantly surprised:

“I can’t believe this is instant coffee!  I would have sweared this was the usual constitutional three-branch representative democracy that I always enjoy after a big meal.”

“This is Folger’s Crystals?  I’m switching right away.  I can’t believe I’ve been making messy, time-consuming government by and for the people all this time!  I could have just added hot water!”

“Did you say this was Folgers? Amazing.  Before tonight, I wouldn’t have touched instant coffee, but now that you’ve tricked me into it, well. I can say, only a fool would brew whole-bean representation when they could save themselves all that effort with instant.”

“Delicious.  I know a few non-democracies that would be interested in this stuff – it’s that good!”





The Future is Fondue

5 01 2008

It’s 2008, and I’m just going about my weekly round of Get Your Ass to Work Days with my nose down and my spirit out to lunch. Soon I may settle down and start contemplating resolutions, but for now all future plans bubble and burble in the primordial ooze of my unconscious, which I imagine to be the texture and flavor of a dairy-free chocolate fondue. 

2008 is going to be great.  It rhymes, so it must be true.  Bad Apple’s gonna break it out in Oh Eight, bet your bippy.  This is the year we become our own super heroes standing on the shoulders of all the super-freaks who’ve ever busted a move sideways and backwards. 

The way I see it, we’ve all got to get working on our inner fondue game, then throw a party that re-invents melting-pot plate tectonics, testing new combinations of ways to enjoy the many unusual pathways to that elusive but inclusive property we all call “delicious.”

Why in heck did god or darwin give us these incredibly-intricate fondue-makers, anyway??  Why provide such a complicated contraption when a simple double-boiler could have done the job?  We moderns barely browse the surface potentiality of our fondueing faculties.  Even Einstein is said to have only used ten percent or so of his appliance.  

It seems we haven’t even stumbled upon the use for 90 percent of the most complicated mechanism the universe ever spat out, and for all we know, 2008 may be the year we discover it!  So let’s all try to eat well and get enough rest so we’re in a good mood when that happens, what do you say?





Comatose for the Holidays

2 01 2008

About sometime yesterday, my spirits began to lift inexplicably as if a dark cloud was dissipating.  Then I realized my improved mood wasn’t inexplicable at all — I was experiencing post-holiday season euphoria.  Soon I’d be back at work without so much as a Santa Claus or a Christmas tree to remind me of the darkest days of the year.

This year, I decided that the next best thing to spending Christmas in a Muslim country is to spend it working and making oodles of money without even enough time to think about the holidays and their brain-sucking processes.  But even two weeks in Morocco can’t compete with my best holiday-escewing idea ever: spending latter December in a nice, restful coma. With a little support from the public, I believe Comatose for the Holidays is a dream we can realize in this lifetime.

Imagine giving the gift of no-gifts, no parties, no memories: Give the gift of a temporary coma to your holiday-hating loved ones or even treat yourself!  Imagine slipping away from the world sometime in late November and rejoining us in early January thinner, totally rested, and without having spent a mint on senseless junk.

Forget about pesky New Years plans – the pressure to have fun, fun, fun.  There is nothing more fun than sleeping through the worst time of the year and waking up a million times better off than everyone facing the new year ravaged by holiday expectations. 

So what do you say folks?  Do I have any takers for Comatose for the Holidays?  We can make it a time share, and offer services for other unpleasant times.  Imagine the convenience of being able to tell your boss/judge/spouse: “But I was in a coma.”

I highly recommend you get in on the bottom floor of this up and coming enterprise in the brand new Good Excuse Industry.