And now for something completely different: a four-year-old boy who kills chickens by screaming:

A villager was quoted as saying the little boy bent over the henhouse window, screaming for a long time, after being scared by the dog.

"One neighbour told police that he had heard the boy's crying that afternoon and another villager confirmed the boy screaming by the henhouse window," the newspaper said.

A court ruled the boy's screaming was "the only unexpected abnormal sound" and that 443 chickens trampled each other to death in fear.

When my two year old grandson is upset, he can hit a loud high note that must have dogs cringing for miles around. I imagine the dogs are thinking, "What the hell was that? Make it stop!"

Sounds like chicken killing boy has similar talents.

Quick. Record that voice. Let's use it in Iraq and Afghanistan. "First they came for the Jews, then the Catholics, then the Chickens !" ;-)

That's the kind of kid you need when you want to clear a restaurant so that your extended family can be seated. As an added bonus the child can kill the chicken for the chef.

So that was the screaming that drove the moderates out of Vermont. Now we know. Howard, how shrill of you.

When my two year old grandson is upset, he can hit a loud high note that must have dogs cringing for miles around.

I've often wondered, while sitting in restaurants long past any child's reasonable bedtime, why the toddler in the next booth hasn't made the windows shatter.

Then again, my eardrums have survived all those instances so maybe I was overreacting.

[...]

Nah.

Quick. Record that voice. Let's use it in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Heh.

Did anyone look at the chickens WHILE the dog was barking? I used to be in the poultry business, and I know that chickens view dogs as they would a fox or wolf or weasel. It's a predator. If they hear a threat, they run the other way, crushing each other in the process.

I always wanted to own a boneless chicken farm.

The real reason the chickens died derives from number theory.

It is well known that flocks of birds when faced with an imminent threat resort to a pre-emptive attack formation by factorizing their total number into at least the product of two numbers N1 and N2. They then randomly assign themselves into N1 groups of N2 each (their attempt at doing so would have been obvious had the Chinese authorities photographed the chickens in a proper avian post-mortem).

Unfortunately for the Chickens, and more unfortunately for the owner of the Chickens, 443 is a Sophie-Germain prime number which obviously cannot be factored such that N1 and N2 are both greater than unity.

The chickens were therfore killed not by stampeding but by the huge mental overload af attempting to factor 443, a very hard job for a chicken.

American Chicken farmers never have 443 chickens in the same coop for this very good reason. Which is why American chicken farms have very large numbers of birds thereby reducing the probability of accidentally placing a non-random number of chickens together. The economics of scale are a subsidiary benefit.

So who was the chicken-hawk leading the 443?

For those of you that suggested that the voice be recorded for use in Iraq and Afghanistan – my, oh my, oh my – for shame... Come on now, Offside and McGehee, both y'all should know better! We couldn't possibly do that because - well, because - because - some might consider that sort of thing to be - you know - torture.

Good Heavens, we can't have that, now.

Better we just "talk" to them in Iraq and Afghanistan, let them know we understand how they are feeling, that we will be packing up and moving on shortly, and oh, by the way, apologies for the misunderstanding caused by those ugly lies GWB told EVERYONE!

/sarc off [Did I do this correctly? This "sarcasm off" thing?]