Electronic Chickens

Chicken News Roundup

• Giant Chicken Holds Up Grocery Store "Donald Haines, 39, of Hilliard, Ohio, admitted to a Columbus court on Nov. 1 that he had dressed up in a chicken costume to rob a Kroger store the previous January."
• Via the Speculist blog, here's an interesting paper entitled "Converting Turkey Offal into Bio-Derived Hydrocarbon Oil with the CWT Thermal Process". Chances are that this is too inefficient to be economically viable, but I'd be happy to be surprised.
• Fed up with disposal costs for undersized chickens that can't be sold, a Czech farm has come up with a clever idea: setting up a crocodile farm next door
• One of the reasons I'm conservative is that I really don't like the government telling me what I can do. Further, the more for which a government is responsible, the more likely people are to come to it for help, instead of dealing with the issue on their own.

  To illustrate this point, here's a sad story about a women who is having to give up her pet chickens because of a city ordinance outlawing them. She made a last ditch appeal to the board to change the law, but...
  

  
  Baker kept up a brave front, but after the decision was made, she couldn't hold back the tears and quickly left the room.

  "What's the matter with people? Why didn't they just come to me?" she said of the neighbor who complained.
  

  
  Definitely worth a read. In the same vein, a resident of Durham, NC, is trying to get his local anti-chicken ordinance changed, too. Hopefully he'll have more success.