Ever since 24 hour “rolling news” became a thing in the mid-nineties, it’s become increasingly hard to check the veracity of the stories we hear.
Mark Twain once said that a lie can get half way around the world while the truth is still putting its pants on, but in an age of constant hunger for information and lightning-fast social networking, the lie can get all the way around the world, win the Tour De France a few times, deny sleeping with its intern, raise tuition fees, break into the Watergate and STILL have time to shoot the truth through the bathroom door and claim it mistook it for a burglar.
In spite of all this uncertainty, however, there are some things that we can take as gospel. One of them is that if somebody forwards something on the internet, it’s absolutely bound to be 100% true without the need for verification, ever.
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Lately, I’ve come across a story about KFC chicken, and how it’s not actually chicken at all. To take a few of the finest pieces (…from the story…), Kentucky Fried Chicken changed their name to KFC because what they were selling wasn’t biologically made of chickens. The animals that went into your average family bucket were, apparently, “genetically manipulated organisms … kept alive by tubes inserted into their bodies to pump blood and nutrients throughout their structures. They have no beaks, no feathers, and no feet.”
I hope everyone realises what this means.
The greatest scientific minds on the planet are not at CERN; they’re working for the Colonel.
Using a secret blend of herbs, spices and genetic engineering, they have created succulent, juicy abominations that laugh in the face of mother nature.
Of course, it’s perfectly fine for absolutely everyone to eat these genetic horrors, as any beakless, featherless, footless chicken that has to be kept alive with a pump is clearly never truly alive, so vegetarians are once again free to enjoy deep-fried mutant without any of that pesky guilt they would normally suffer. And non-vegetarians who eat at KFC obviously have a fairly slack attitude to their own internal organs right off the bat, so they wouldn’t be worried anyway.
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According to the all-knowing exposé quoted above, the reason for creating an entirely new species of helpless, labour-intensive Frankenbird is to save money, which makes sense. Who needs the hassle of an avian with a working circulatory system when you can invest in (presumably) thousands of miles of piping and millions of miniature pacemakers? Real chickens feed themselves, and that sounds like a drain on resources when you can (one assumes) hire extra staff to force feed-tubes into the gurgling, beakless orifices of your technological hellspawn.
There’s a sacrosanct idea in news circles that sources should be protected, especially in cases of whistle-blowing, so I don’t break the vow lightly, but news this revelatory needs citations, so I’m not afraid to say that I learned this information from something a middle-aged auntie posted on my Facebook wall.
I believe Hemingway covered the Spanish Civil War using the same method.
Of course, there’s always room for error. It’s just possible that actually, all of the above is a pile of obvious bullshit. That Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC due to the modern love of acronyms, because patrons forced to use that many syllables instead of a three-letter phrase would have been, like, OMG WTF LOL!
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There’s even an outside chance that this scare-story is a re-hashing of an almost word-for-word identical e-mail scam from 1999, but that’s probably just internet paranoia.
The smoking gun in all this? Some people say it’s impossible to have bald, hideous creatures kept alive by a blood-pump because they have no heart, causing irreparable damage to the common man.
To these people, I say: We’ve already had Dick Cheney…
