A brief note on Igor
I took my kids Sam (7) and Kit (5) to see Igor this weekend. In my duties as loving father, I am often asked to trundle my kids to see movies that I, in an ideal world, might otherwise decline to take in. Because I want my kids to grow up with a love of going to the movies, I will take them to see anything they want to, assuming it is remotely appropriate for their ages (thus, no Iron Man, which Kit desperately wanted to see, and no Dark Knight). Sometimes this means sitting through a movie that is an inoffensive time-waster (like Space Chimps or Alvin and the Chipmunks or Fly Me to the Moon), and sometimes it means being pleasantly surprised (I took them to see Kung-Fu Panda three times, and one of those times they didn’t even want to go).
The Hen-House Crisis
My fellow Americans, today I would like to address the problem we face with America’s hen-house.
Due to circumstances no one really understands, foxes have been put in charge of operating our hen-house. There will be plenty of time in the future to debate about whose decision it was to put foxes in charge of the hen-house, but the fact remains that the foxes have eaten all the hens and now we are out of hens. This is a crisis of far-reaching import — American hens are the envy of the world and we cannot afford to be without them. I shall call this the Hen-House Crisis.
I have spoken with the foxes who run our hen-house and they have assured me that this is a crisis. Our hen-house must be filled with hens immediately or it will lead to a world-wide shortage of hens. That means no chicken dinners, no scrambled eggs, no Denver omelets, no feathered pillows. And that cannot be allowed to happen. The world turns to us for hens and hen-related policy.
And so it is up to each and every American to supply our foxes with more hens, to dig deep and sacrifice their hard-earned hens so that the foxes will have more hens to mind. This is the only way out of this crisis — the foxes must be given more hens. It is the only solution to our problem, and anyone who suggests otherwise, well I have to question their belief in hens.
If the foxes are not given more hens, they will go hungry, and we cannot afford a nation with hungry foxes. Foxes are the backbone of our hen-fox structure — foxes provide America with whatever hens they don’t devour, and if we don’t supply our foxes with an unending stream of hens we will have no hens at all.
My plan calls for Americans to supply our foxes with seven hundred billion hens — give or take, on an ongoing basis, whenever the foxes ask for them, for whatever purposes the foxes see fit. This deal is non-negotiable and permanent, and our foxes will be under no obligation to tell us how they are tending our hens or when, if ever, we will ever see any hens again. Because we need so many hens immediately, this means that a lot of Americans who have never raised hens will need to learn to do so, otherwise our foxes will have no hens to tend. Some Americans may need to work an extra job in order to buy the materials they will need to raise hens to give to our foxes, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to demand.
I have been assured by America’s foxes that they will be very wise and cautious in the stewardship of these billions upon billions of hens, that the hens we provide the foxes will be bred into even more hens, which will then, the foxes assure me, returned to the Americans who provided them. We will then be, I am told, swimming in hens, thanks to the very wise foxes of the American hen-house industry.