This is from a post to the newsgroup where Lark talks about slowing down the tape in "In Dreams" so that she could see the words Mr Katimsky had written on the chalkboard as extra credit. I made the whole list sorry that she asked by posting my response. :) She writes :
I slowed my tape down and took a closer look at the words on the blackboard. Quite interesting. Among others (I couldn't read all of them) I found:Capture, dehydrate, dessicate, parallel, perpendicular, serendipity, extraneous, sacred, mendacity, dubious, vituperative, specious, superlative, procrastinate, ulterior, sycophant, vacuous, temerity, loquacious, conundrum
Anyone else care to use those words in a sentence?
What a conundrum! Having escaped the cage, the chicken knew not what to do with his freedom.
The chicken had a choice between allowing himself to be recaptured by the human and thus living a content life - until the swift, appointed end; or crossing the road, escaping to possibly dehydrate, and dessicate into a flattened corpse out here in the middle of this road.
Ah, the sacred mendacity of Cluck, the chicken god, who posed such dubious choices to his poor creations, who must struggle just to simply to survive and can barely afford the luxury of extraneous considerations like this.
What ulterior motives must guide such a god? The childish pleasure of turning perfectly good, innocent creatures into prancing, vacuous sycophants who outwardly praise and bow before the mighty, superlative Cluck, while under their breaths they issue vituperative curses at both Cluck and their Fate?
No time for philosophy now. The busy road called, tantalized. Humans consider whether to be or not to be, but it is a chicken's appropriately humble station in life to ponder whether to cross the road, to perpendicularly bisect man's painted parallel lines, seemingly crossable, but philosophically as tall as mountains.
The chicken hated himself for his specious procrastination, the choice was before him, he must choose between freedom and death, and he did not know, and could not tell, in what direction each of them lay. No amount of loquacious internal dialogue would avert the choice before him.
The chicken hated humans for the power of their choices, a change of mind for a human automatically meant a change in the human's fortune. They have the power to guide their destiny. Not so for a chicken. Slowly, his chicken wits marshalling behind him, the chicken hatched a plan.
Aha! Serendipity! His way across to the other side was suddenly clear. Not a car in sight. With the usual chicken temerity gone, the temerity that had formerly oppressed him his whole life, with his eyes now clear, he stepped forward, and crossed the road.
The next morning, the farmer easily followed the chicken tracks. Escaped through the fence here...under the shrubs through here...up to the road here...and then he hesitated...and then he crossed the road. The farmer scratched her head. That is not common chicken behavior, she thought to herself. Uncommon chicken valor indeed.
A question formed in the farmer's powerful, fate-deciding, all-knowing human mind. Why did the chicken cross the road?
It was the humans who were in the conundrum now. They have wondered,
and scratched all their powerful human heads, postulating possible answers,
ever since. And that is how the humble chicken got his rich revenge.
Signed,
- Alfredostoyevsky