You always
hear about it, but thankfully it’s never happened to me… the
inevitable 4th of July mishap. Worst I’ve endured is some minor burns,
maybe a bit of lightheadedness from crouching down on the sidewalk to
watch a SNAKE - and taking a faceful of that seemingly-neverending snake smoke. Truth be told, Michigan
is a crap state to be in if you want to play with the dangerous (ie:
cool) fireworks. What we are allowed in this state are fireworks that
do any or all of the above:

Sparkle.

Make a high-pitched shriek that may or may not have just made you shit yourself.

Crackle.

Emit showers of sparks.

Create billows of toxic smoke.

Did I mention that we have a lot of stuff that makes sparks?

So,
that’s the Michigan version of July 4th fun. Thankfully, we do have
states that border us that sell the "cool stuff," and that’s a good
thing - you know what they say, "It wouldn’t be the 4th of July without grandma losing a toe!"

Some
people out there even make their own little fireworks, just from shit
they have lying around, like some kind of hillbilly MacGyver. For
example, take these bikers in Ohio - they were doing a little bit of
the homemade action, and things went wrong. (Imagine that!) On the less
funny side of things, two people lost their lives as a result. Click HERE to read the full article. Now, in the interest of finding comedy in the face of tragedy, here’s an excerpt of the full article:

James
McKinniss, 39, and Jackie Byrd, 64, both of Marion, were killed by
flying pieces of metal when a two-foot steel tube being used a cannon
exploded Saturday night.

Witnesses told the Marion County
Sheriff’s Office that the cannon was used to fire pieces of bread.
Investigators said the device had been fired about 24 times without
incident before the explosion.

I should point
out that they were not only lighting off a "firework" that delivered a
crowd-pleasing explosion of… bread (Bread. The firework shot bread
out. I can’t stress enough how funny I find this) but anyway - not only
did it shoot out a blast of bread, but they had already blown the bread
load 24 times. Apparently a good thing never gets old. Or crazy
methed-up bikers don’t give a shit about shit, which is a
pretty aggressive attitude - I say, "You go, bikers," but I say it in a
way that won’t get my ass beat by bearded,
smelling-like-an-ashtray-you-spilled-beer-and-farted-in, bread-blastin’
bikers. In addition to the fact that 2 men died in a bread-bombing
incident, one of them had the surname "Byrd," which is practically "BIRD,"
and birds… well, birds like bread. Is this irony, or coincidence, or
me pulling shit out of my ass? I always get the three confused.

So, I was hanging out with Matt and his roommate Matt the other day when Matt
let us know that not only had he solved the age-old question of "What
came first, the chicken or the egg?", but he had published it to his blog for all to see. Some interesting conversation ensued, and by the end, I was convinced that:

1. I had the answer.

2. Matt didn’t.

3. The other Matt agreed with me.

4. Two people that live together and have the same name is a funny thing to me.

5. Lemurs are still pretty rad.

What I decided was that the egg came first. It’s just that simple. The main point raised on wtf_man is:

"All birds
incubate their eggs by supplying heat from their bodies, and give the
young devoted care. That heat may be considerable, since the normal
temperature of a bird varies from 100 to 112 Fahrenheit according to
the species. Once incubation begins the bird seldom leaves the nest,
and then not long, because the eggs will not hatch if they get too
cold."

So, no specific incubation temperature, no
hatchin, blah blah blah. I say that the damned egg came first, and it
came through a series of evolutionary changes an ancient lizard-like
creature underwent. Maybe one time, this lizard has a batch of eggs
that hatch with a strange, hard material around their mouths - a beak.
These beaked lizards procreate, and throughout their time on the
planet, maybe a brood hatched that had feathers, or walked slightly
more bipedally, or grew vestigial wings, or … anything more
chicken-ish. Until one day, as a final step in the evolution of the
chicken (as we know it), what we know today as the chicken hatched out
of some feathery, beaky lizard’s egg. And that was the chicken. But it
came out of an egg.

I’m not smart enough to delve into the genetics of the chicken,
but I am smart enough to know that a chicken popping out of nowhere and
just proceeding to strut, or peck, or whatever they do… is absurd.