Psycho Chicken With Fingers On Top!
Squawked upon prior to June 13, 2010.
After recovering from my enlugubrious Sefernday celebratorials sometime around Wednesday this week (I had quite the hangunder!), I set myself a new goal this week: Eat at least sixteen buckets of KFC’s Extra Crispy chicken before Sunday. I realized this goal would be quite difficult to achieve in the time frame allotted, so I had to set about it at once.
The parsimonious blibble-babble of nattering lawn gnomes did little to deter me (although it did cause me to enter into a pwee-weeing fit of panic on Thursday afternoon after said lawn gnomes had accreted fully about my door jambs and radio consoles), nor did the existence of Alyssa Milano’s feet squelching through the mud do little to dissuade me from my course of gustatory action.
First, to discover which KFC was closest to my palatial palace of a home at 229B Bouillabaisse Boulevard. A quick jaunt over to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that even a lobotomy patient can edit, revealed nothing, but I did learn that William Howard Taft participated in a wet T-shirt contest in 1834 and that wet T-shirt contests were originally invented in 1286, only six years prior to the actual invention of the T-shirt itself. Further investigation revealed that T-shirts were made primarily from cotton, wool, and recycled doorknobs, and that the man who did invent T-shirts (in 1286) was also responsible for both the automobile and floor-mounted underwear [citation needed]. I then learned that the automobile was in fact invented in 1934 by P.T. Barnum, world-famous suckerpuncher, and Dirk Dirk McGuirk, a little-known cheddar machinist who spent most of his life in the Arizona State Prison after tater-totting six twelve-year-olds in 2004. Finally, it was revealed to me that the Arizona State Prison system is in fact located mostly in the abutting states of New Mexico, Texas, and Idaho, due to the fact that Arizona is mostly an uninhabitable swamp. I also learned that the word “abut” has nothing to do with a butt but shared an etymology with a piece of Old Norse wood.
Whereas this was all highly informative, and entertaining, it was getting me no closer to learning where the closest KFC was, and time was running out for me to procure my sixteen buckets of KFC’s Extra Crispy chicken.
Wednesday ended and Thursday began, sometime around 11:59 at night on Wednesday. I was still no closer to locating the nearest KFC, although by this point, still glued to my computering seat in front of Wikipedia, I had now learned that more kings of England had been named “Edward” than “George,” and that porn star Jada Fire had once been a backup singer for the Ramones in 1947. All of these entries were also marked “citation needed,” so I wrote Wikipedia some citations and mailed them to the Wikimedia Foundation, the assemblage of tomfoolery that claimed to run the free encyclopedia that apparently a whole gaggle of lobotomy patients had, in fact, edited.
On Thursday, after discovering that Earl’s job is to push over trees for the Wesayso (“We Say So”) Corporation, and that numerous bilateral kelilactirals are required for the main firomactal drive unit of the USS Enterprise to function properly, I hit upon the Wikipedia entry for a cartoon character from the 1840s named “Psycho Chicken With Fingers On Top.” Noted for being one of Walt Disney’s earliest creations, Psycho Chicken went on to inspire a man named Colon Earl Sanders to start the first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Missouri in 1902.
Ha! “Now we’re on to something!” I shouted to the four winds (and five large intestines). My synapses started piecing things together, and soon I had deduced all I needed to know: “KFC” was most indubitably an abbreviation—or some would say, an initialism—for “Kentucky Fried Chicken,” and since KFC sold chicken in bucket loaders, they must be the same entity! Now, to locate the nearest Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet…
Delving deeper and deeper into the free encyclopedia that even a fourteen-year-old high school dropout can vandalize, I learned that Kentucky Fried Chicken (otherwise referred to as “Kentucky Friend Chicken” three times in the same article) was in fact formerly known as KFC, but that alas, the entire chain of restaurants had gone out of business following the Great Fluffernutter Deluge of 1985. A footnote claimed that Nate sucked cocks.
“Wait a minute… the Great Fluffernutter Deluge was in 1958, not 1985!” I squawked aloud, realizing that Wikipedia was… dare I say it… wrong about something. But… this was the free encyclopedia that even your pet monkey could edit! So, my jaw set in grim determination, I looked about the article for the famed “edit” button in order to fix this obvious, obvious error. Soon I would unleash my vast, vast knowledge of the Great Fluffernutter Deluge of ’58 upon the ignorant, ignorant twits that had created this Wikipedia article.
But in place of the “edit” button, all I could find was a little thingamabooble labeled “view source.” Apparently the gods of Wikipedia had decided that this article was perfect and in no need of corrections. Or perhaps they just didn’t want someone named Phillip Norbert Årp to be able to update the free encyclopedia that even professional spammers could edit.
The horror.
…The horror.
I stared at my computering screen, in abject despair, until Friday had finally rolled around (about an hour before 1 a.m., if I recall correctly). But it was then that I learned that my refrigerator had broken, spoiling the 5,800 pounds of frozen yak meat that I had bought from a door-to-door salesman 3¾ weeks ago. I completely forgot about the free encyclopedia that even John Updike’s undead corpse could edit. And, I was mad, so I crouched down in front of my kitchen window, opened it a crack, and started shrieking into the darkness outside. Lights went on, cars stopped, and people stared. Off in the distance, a dog parked.
There would be no sixteen buckets of KFC’s Extra Crispy chicken for me this week. There would be no more Psycho Chicken With Fingers On Top ads extolling the virtues of prepaid homeowner’s insurance. And now there would be no more yak meat either.
I sat down and cried.