Sometimes Things Are Not As They Seem - Part 1

• Remember when I linked to the Subservient Chicken website? Well, Old Oligarch mentioned that someone told him the site wasn't real, so I took a look at Snopes and found this explanation:

  Actually, the chicken has a repertoire of about 300 different actions, each triggered by the entry of one of the combinations of nouns, verbs and other parts of speech programmed into its "vocabulary." A complete list of trigger words and the clips they invoke has already been posted to the Internet, although it appears the clips can no longer be viewed directly from external web links. (That is, if you want to see the chicken jump, you have to go to subservientchicken.com and enter the command "jump" — if you try to go directly to the URL for the "jump" clip, all you'll see is the chicken waving an accusatory finger at you.) A Subservient Chicken Request List has also been established to chronicle the actions the chicken will or will not perform.

  After I linked this site, I later wondered if it might be some kind of program that just looked like a live webcam. I feel kind of foolish that I thought it was a live webcam at first, but at least I wasn't the only one.

• When I first read about this, I was pretty disgusted. But, as it turns out, the site in question (which will not be directly linked here) is a hoax. Thank God for small mercies...