The Chicken Story

I don't feel like posting about Masto today, so instead I'm going to post my chicken story.

Approximately a million years ago, when I was about 11 my mom, step-dad, sister and I moved into a duplex.  It was great because for the first time in my life I had my own bedroom.  Seriously, amazing.

The duplex was on one of the busiest streets in that city.  Across from the duplex was a little farm.  Yes, on the busiest street in town.  Farm.  I don't know why.  It just was.  So after we'd been living there a while a gas station bought the property next to the farm.  (Confused yet?  Good!  Here's a bad paintshop drawing just for you internets!)

Okay, so the yellow box is our duplex, and then the farm is the brown box.  There was a little natural gas substation thing.... between the farm and the property where the gas station got built.

So shortly after the gas station was built the farm sold out to a bank.  And the farm people left.  And took most of their animals with them.  EXCEPT.... they left their chickens.  So for the first couple of weeks the chickens were fine.  And then the chickens got hungry.  And they started trying to cross REALLY busy street to find food.

You can imagine this ended really well for the chickens.

Oh wait, no it didn't.

So one chicken would get clipped by a car, and then the other chickens would ... there's really no nice way to put this.  The other chickens turned into carrion chickens.  They would chow down on the poor sucker that got hit by the car.

This bummed us out.  So for a while we tried going over and feeding the chickens.  But let's face it, they weren't our responsibility and they were quickly turning feral and killing each other.

At this point.. and admittedly I get a little brain fuzzy here... there was a "convenient" fire at the chicken farm. It started small.  But in this area we have unpredictable winds.  So does anyone want to guess how this ends?  Yeah, the winds pick up and the small fire gets kind of out of control and it's right next to this natural gas pumping station (which the line was somehow connected to our property) and then the gas station.  The gas station shut down all it's pumps and there were tons of fire trucks.  Pretty exciting.

The fire took out the last of the chickens.  There's STILL nothing on that property to this day, and it's been like 18 years....

Now the other part of this story...  I was a nerdy kid, and my family and I played Magic: the Gathering.  A collectible card game.  And we subscribed to a magazine called "Scrye" which encouraged readers to send in Magic cards that they had designed.  They were called "Cut-Ups".  The best ones were published in the back of the magazine.  That summer I sent probably 12 Chicken themed "Cut-Ups" cards in to Scrye.  I thought they were HILARIOUS.  The one I most clearly remember was "Carrion Chicken" that got a carrion counter for every chicken card in play.  But they never got published.. =(

So imagine my surprise when about two years later when my dad (who was still playing Magic: the Gathering) shows up with some new Magic cards.  From an expansion called Unglued.  And they have a whole set of .... CHICKEN CARDS!!!

Now, I obviously cannot prove that Wizards of the Coast stole my chicken cards idea.  This was pre-digital cameras, pre-scanners.  I don't have copies of the originals and everything you submitted to Scrye became property of Scrye and Wizards of the Coast.  But dangit!  That is TOTALLY my idea! 

So that is the Chicken story.  =D