KFC to Activists: Mmm... Fried Chicken!

fter coming under increased scrutiny in recent months for the inhumane treatment of the 736 million chickens they cannonball into American gullets every year, the fast food chain KFC made a sweeping public statement this week to address the concerns of consumers, animal rights activists, and the chickens themselves:

“Mmm… fried chicken!�

The statement, made in a low baritone and accompanied by a belly-rubbing gesture, has incensed PETA activists who have spent years working to change the chain’s practices. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals representatives have accused KFC of buying from suppliers who practice inhumane methods of raising and slaughtering chickens, including using drugs to breed chickens to grotesque proportions which cripple the bird, housing chickens in cages too small for the birds to stand up, resulting in the chickens actually growing around the cage wire, and combating the resulting panicked violent chicken behavior by cutting off the birds’ beaks. PETA also contends that these suppliers finish the screwjob by scalding the birds to death in feather removal tanks, just in case they didn’t get the message that life is a brutal and heartless experience.

Still, this latest statement represents a landmark for KFC, whose previous responses to activists had been even more insulting.

“KFC uses only the highest quality ingredients,� answered KFC’s US spokeswoman Bonnie Warschauer in 1996, rubbing her tummy when asked if it might not be unreasonable for KFC to raise the prices of its meals by a penny to pay for humane improvements, which might keep the general public from having to hear really gross chicken stories from liberal arts majors all the time.

In recent months, all-white-meat actress Pamela Anderson and noted extra-tasty-crispy comedian Russell Simmons have joined PETA in speaking out against the fast-food chain, a move that the group’s officials bemoan but have been powerless to block.

“If people knew how KFC treats chickens, they’d never eat another drumstick,� stated Anderson, no stranger to questionable breast-meat. Drumstick-eaters interviewed the street disagreed with Anderson, arguing that they were pretty sure KFC kills the shit out of their chickens before frying their corpses is scalding oil, but still wanted to know if she was hot in person.

KFC has also come under fire in recent weeks from health groups, who have taken offense at the chain’s commercials promoting KFC as a healthier alternative to other fast foods. The ads in question feature the animated “Colonel� character announcing, “Burgers give you ass cancer!� then rubbing his tummy and intoning sensually “Mmm… fried chicken!�

KFC, a unit of Louisville-based Yum Brands Inc., has been struggling with slumping sales in recent years, and has sought to address both its fiscal and public relations woes with the introduction of the new “extra-tasty-crazy� fried chicken variety, based on the popular assumption that chickens driven mad by slaughterhouse conditions might likely have an especially zesty flavor. The fast food chain was previously known as Kentucky Fried Chicken, but changed its name in 1991 to distance its products from the negative connotations of fried foods, chickens, and the state of Kentucky.

This latest obscene hand-gesture directed at animal rights groups by KFC is likely bad news for consumers, as PETA activists are already discussing the possibility of handing out buckets of mutilated chickens in front of KFC restaurants, unless they can think of something more disgustingly gut-wrenching on the way to the protest.

fforts to rebuild Iraq achieved a success Friday when U.N. officials, voiced by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, pledged funding for the reconstruction from the official United Nations "swear jar."

The swear jar, instituted in the 1960s during initial squabbles between Israel and surrounding Islamic nations, became a staple of public negotiations at the U.N. building in New York. Familiar statements such as, "Please, ambassador—there are ladies present," or, "Does the Prime Minister kiss his mother with that mouth?" became outlets for relief of tension with the high-strung representatives of many nations.

The legacy of the swear jar since its inception has spawned many rumors with U.N. fans, or "Unies," as they are called behind their backs. In 1967 the popular story was the swear jar had accumulated $432,000, all of which would be used for a hootenanny-slash-barbecue that summer, until Cold War relations worsened and the jar was put aside for possible war reparations to the eventual winning side. In 1978, after years of U.N. members dipping in for candy bars and vending machine sodas, the swear jar funds were down to $1.3 million, despite accruing an estimated $3.9 million in the time since public discussion of its allocation, and popular sentiment at that time was to use the bounty to build a new recreation room with new pool tables, a 27-inch TV, and a sofa with its upholstry intact. In 1990, during the first Gulf War crisis, the U.N. elected to move the swear jar money to a ceramic Mickey Mouse bank so everyone would be less likely to replenish other funds from swear-earned income.

At Friday's donor dinner, which is fun to say, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed attendees from the United Nations and requested approximately $35.8 billion through 2007 or "best offer" for the rebuilding of war torn Iraq, in which we did most of the tearing.

Angry nations and their angrier representatives expressed disinterest in springing for rebuilding out of their own pockets after explicitly making their aversion to the war public. Miniature squabbles resulted in the aftermath, adding an estimated $43 to the swear jar before lunchtime, but U.N. executives managed to chill out the crowd with a copy of Bob Marley's Legend album.

With the uproar squashed, Secretary General Kofi Annan sparked a quiet hush in the room when he turned to Treasury Secretary Candy and asked, "How much is in the swear jar?" After conferring privately with the secretary, Annan nodded and turned back toward the microphone, pronouncing, "I think we can swing it."

Most countries found the pledge agreeable, but the allocation of the swear jar funding did have its opponents. French ambassador Henrí Bois-Bois was quick to voice his dissent.

"If the U.S. expects the rest of the Western world to step in and pay to make its repairs when it gives us no voice in preventing a war, we are setting a dangerous precedent by agreeing to do so," stated the dignitary. "Also, there are many of us who had not given up hope on getting jackets with our names on the back done up. Those are not going to pay for themselves. Does the U.S. propose to pay for those in exchange? This is so unfair."

The swear jar allocation, if it happens, could be the largest expenditure of U.N. community bank since financing a pizza party to settle the Falkland Islands dispute with money found in the rec room couch cushions.

Anyone who receives a decent volume of correspondence from the American public will be convinced of one of two things. One is that the American public is retarded. The other is that the English language is retarded. A small subset may conclude that both are true, which is a mean but highly defensible position.

Unless you live on the campus of a major American university, or are rich enough to never have to shop at Wal-Mart, it is a dangerous proposition to believe the bulk of humanity inherently stupid, because the only way off that cruise ship to hell is a Winchester round in the mouth. It is a far better thing to point your stupid-blaming finger elsewhere, and in the case of mainstream America's inability to compose a coherent sentence or spell "comeuppance," the ripest target for pointing is indeed our very stupid language.

As anyone learning English for the first time can attest, it is clearly a language designed by a wretched and miserable people. Spelling holds no bearing on pronunciation, each letter makes several different sounds without rhyme or reason, and there are no accent markings whatsoever. The letters "X" and "C" are completely redundant. Words that are spelled entirely differently (won, one) are pronounced the same, yet have different meanings. Other words are spelled virtually the same but pronounced in wildly different ways (tough, though, thought). And we wonder why people moving to our country can never seem to master the language or make a decent Burrito Supreme.

Why is this, when people the world over who have vastly inferior weapons-making technology to ours still have languages that work fine? How did we manage to screw the pooch so completely in this most basic of tasks? The answer is the English language's roots as a bastard tongue that was never intended to be taken seriously in the first place.

English originated in 600 AD when some guys who were stoned were fucking around, making up words, and it soon spread as a way for little girls to alienate their parents while they were having sleepover parties. In short, it was the Pig Latin of its day. Over the years, more people in the lower classes began to use the language, since it was seen as a cool and antiestablishment way to communicate, more "street" than the stuffy proper languages of Europe. For hundreds of years there was no proper spelling of any word in English, writers spelled everything any damned way they pleased, but eventually the fad grew too big and the squares found out about it.

One giant square, Richard "Big Dork" Mulcaster of London, took it upon himself to devise a standardized spelling of English words. The socially maladjusted Mulcaster sought to prove his intellectual superiority by arranging the spelling of words not phonetically, but rather by extrapolating their historical origins. This was precisely the kind of thing that got him his ass kicked daily back in school, and for good reason.

Mulcaster, a back-of-the-closet homosexual, was terrified of homophones (words pronounced the same), and this greatly influenced his spelling scheme. Thanks to Mulcaster, virtually any combination of letters in English can be pronounced any way the writer likes, to avoid the possibility of spelling two different words the same way and being exposed as gay.

Between 1066 and 1400, England was ruled by the Normans, an insane clan of men who all had the same first name. They demanded that everyone speak Norman French, the same half-assed dialect American tourists speak when visiting Europe. By the time Henry IV reclaimed England for the English in 1399, the only people who remembered the English language at all were hilariously senile, and their vague remembrances became the foundation for modern English. But even then the language was not done being molested: In the 1400's the printing press was invented, and printing presses were run only by foreign immigrants who didn't know constant exposure to lead-based inks gives you cancer. Since printers were paid by the line, they frequently padded out words with extra letters to make their layouts more visually pleasing and profitable. In time, these skylarkings became standard English spellings of words since nobody cared and it was raining all the time anyhow.

This hideous amalgam of modern spelling had become standardized by 1700, with the first dictionary appearing in 1755. Between 1750 and 1850 both Benjamin Franklin and Noah Webster attempted to make some sense of the English language, but in the end only succeeded in adding more words, including the noun "noat" for a midget-sized ark and the verb "franklin'" for being blown off a toilet in the middle of the night by a bolt of lightning.

Shorthand inventor Sir Isaac Pitman, drawn to spelling reform by the nonsensical spelling of his first name, developed the Phonotype alphabet in 1842, which succeeded in inspiring all manner of freaks to come out of the woodwork and develop their own alphabets. When the writer George Bernard Shaw died in 1950, one condition of his will was that a new English alphabet be developed in his name, which led to the creation of the Shaw-script, a hilarious new alphabet that looks exactly like a Word document accidentally converted into Wingdings.

Subsequent attempts at "fixing" the English alphabet have been dismal failures, since even simple spelling reform makes words look goofy, and anyone who's spent twenty years learning to spell English sort-of correctly isn't about to chuck all that just to make things easier on little kids and immigrants. And so, th status kwo of th Inglish layngwaj lumbrs forwrd unchaynjd, az it haz sins 1755.

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