Word: chickened
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...Chicken Run's style and tone will be endearingly familiar to those who have seen Park's Oscar-winning short work. Creature Comforts (1989) attached the comments of zoo visitors to claymated lions, bears and baby hippos, with sad and hilarious results. The trio A Grand Day Out (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995) were mini-epics starring Wallace, a staid, daft suburban bachelor inventor, and his brilliant, long-suffering dog Gromit. Park has now adapted to feature length his obsession with the forlorn wit of caged animals, with the quiet exasperation of rural English life...
Park, Lord and screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick stocked Chicken Run with a cross section of Brit types: Bunty (Imelda Staunton) is bossy; silly Babs (Jane Horrocks, who played Bubble on Ab Fab) is forever knitting--when she gets morose, she knits a noose. Mac (Lynn Ferguson) is the nearsighted soul of Scottish ingenuity. Fowler (Benjamin Whitrow), a crusty veteran of the RAF, says Yanks can't be trusted: "always late for every war." The hens' lines to the outside world are Nick (Timothy Spall) and Fetcher (Phil Daniels), two music-hall Cockney rats--larcenists with a soft streak...
...might seem fanciful, but for Park, who was raised in rural Lancashire, Chicken Run comes close to a childhood memoir. "My family had chickens," he says, "just as pets. They used to come into the porch and eat the food, like a dog really. Or they'd come in the house and steal things. We couldn't bear to eat them; they were characters. Then when I was 16 or 17, I had a summer job at a chicken-packing factory; we had to fold up plucked chickens and pack them in cellophane trays. I also did a day working...
...that your host's handsome, copper saute pan is 25% off at Williams-Sonoma. Meanwhile, as the dish comes to a tantalizing simmer--at about 6:45 p.m., just when your family of four usually gets serious about ordering takeout--the TV suggests clicking to order etouffee (and nonspicy chicken fingers for the kids) from a local restaurant. It's a creepy intrusion, sure. But that etouffee looks mighty tasty...
...course, cyber Cassandras have been tolling the bell for Moore's law for decades. As physicist Carver Mead puts it, "The Chicken Little sky-is-falling articles are a recurring theme." But even Mead admits that by 2014 the laws of physics may have their final revenge. Transistor components are fast approaching the dreaded point-one limit--when the width of transistor components reaches .1 microns and their insulating layers are only a few atoms thick. Last year Intel engineer Paul Packan publicly sounded the alarm in Science magazine, warning that Moore's law could collapse. He wrote, "There...