We all know her and somehow love her, despite her sniveling. Yes, Chicken Little. The story has been told a thousand, thousand times, across the world and back again.
The evil acorn thrusts itself from the tree, striking Chicken Little on her fluffy little head. And she freaks. Up, down, left, and right. She freaks. We know her anthem, “The sky if falling, the sky is falling.” And the adventure begins.
She skips breakfast and her pedicure. She decides, instead, to be a hero, to save the day, because as she just found out, “The sky is falling.” She does what every heroic chicken would do. She sets off to tell the King.
Let me add a personal note here. It is twofold.
1. The next time someone calls you a “chicken,” you can laugh in the face of danger and say, in a Sarah Pailin voice, “You betcha.”
AND.
2. I have chickens. They lay eggs. They are heroic, beyond a doubt.
Back to the story, we know so well. Sort of.
The thing about the story is this. It has SO many different endings. As mentioned, Chicken Little heads to the castle to tell the King. Along the way, she meets a lot of friends who go with her on the quest. Most of them are other fowl, like Goosey Loosey, Ducky Lucky, Turkey Lurkey, and so forth. The Golden Girls did a splendid version of this.
Anyway, to reiterate, there are several versions. In the original, a fox named Foxy Loxy leads them all into his lair, and he eats them. Kills them and then eats them. The end.
The moral of the story in this one is, “Don’t believe everything you hear.”
In the kinder version, they make it to the King, where the truth is found. But it was good of the little chicken to try to save the world. The moral being, “It is noble to have courage and to believe in yourself.”
Either way, the sky was falling. Chicken Little knew it, she told her friends, and they became alarmed too. How it turns out for them depends on which book is in the hands of the storyteller. The Story God, if you will.
So, as a public service announcement, I am just relaying what I’ve heard in the news. I can assure you, the sky really is falling.
Or at least a big freaking rocket from the sky. Yes. There is a Chinese Rocket coming down, and it is going to hit somewhere. Probably Saturday, and it could crash into a populated area.
It is not tiny either. It is much, much larger than The Statue of Liberty.
Here is why it is going to hit. The rocket took off, from China, on April 29.
And usually, when rockets liftoff, they drop their discarded core rockets, or first-stage rockets, into the sea just minutes after liftoff. Instead, the whole big thing went into orbit. Now it is done orbiting, and it is coming down. Or some such nonsense.
People before me have gone to tell the King. And all the kings everywhere — the people in charge — the powers that be — are saying, “Whoopsie. Buy a hard hat, folks.”
So, the version of the story that’s coming around? Well, it could be the dang Foxy Loxy version where everyone dies in the end. I’m just saying.
And I’m saying it like I mean it, “The sky is falling. The sky is falling.”
============
“How many times had those awful words – “I know what I’m doing” – been uttered throughout history as prelude to disaster?”
― Christopher Buckley
===========
“He who has overcome his fears will truly be free.”
― Aristotle
==========
“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden
=========
A big rocket could land on anyone’s head
