This is a very simple costume, and is designed to be easy to put on, but still make you look like a chicken. It is made of foam and has a puffy tail attached. It is light and comfortable, so you can wear it all day at the Thanksgiving Day Parade or while wandering around the streets of your town.
It’s not just for Halloween costumes, it’s also great for kids who want to dress up as “chicken” for the day. This costume is fun and cheap!
I have a friend who is a writer in Paris. Every year she attends the holidays in New York and gets a few words on the subject published in an English-language journal. In her article, she talks about an American woman who once cooked Thanksgiving dinner for the French president and his wife.
The woman had prepared the meal as a surprise, but halfway through it she realized she had forgotten to wear her chicken costume. The party guests were waiting expectantly, and if they had known that their hostess would be serving up turkey without the traditional sidekick, no one can imagine how they might have reacted.
It’s all so absurdly trivial, but I think we are essentially chickens ourselves when it comes to trivial matters like this. We know that it’s so silly to care about what we put on our faces for holiday dinners, yet we do it anyway.
Some are costumes that are way too expensive. Some are just weird. This is one of the weird ones I’ve seen: a chicken costume. I guess it’s supposed to be funny, but I don’t get it.
What’s the point? What kind of person wears a chicken costume? Is it a customer at a chicken restaurant who goes there and gets in line for the buffet and then asks the server to put him next to that guy who only wants chicken, and he says, “Hey, man, this is my favorite day of the year. Let’s party.”
I guess if you’re going to wear a chicken costume, you might as well have an egg on your head. But I don’t think eggs are really the point; it’s about role-playing and masquerading. So just be honest about what you’re doing and say, “I want to look like a chicken and eat all the food off the buffet.”
The chicken costume is a known quantity, but the pumpkin costume is not. The pumpkin costume may be more fun, but it’s also much more of a risk. You don’t know what kind of trouble it will cause you.
We put on these costumes for Thanksgiving because we want to appear strange and different. But that is less important at other times of the year. If you are going to wear a chicken costume to a wedding, there are other considerations that make it less risky: you have the consent of your partner; you aren’t inviting people who disapprove of chickens; and if you are going to dress up in public, you have to have something to wear underneath.
But the idea that the chicken knows more than we do is itself a stereotype. It’s a stereotype of economists, at least, who are convinced that they can explain all human behavior in economic terms. The economic approach to the chicken problem is that the bird knows perfectly well what it’s doing, and spends its time pecking at seeds because pecking is good for chickens. However, economics is not a very good way to predict the future.
There are more direct ways to tell whether the chicken is smart. One of them comes from cognitive science, which describes how animals think about problems. In most animals, planning is done subconsciously; if you ask a dog to fetch you a ball she will go get one, but if she were asked to fetch you two balls she would get confused and bring you only one. You might think this was a bad way for dogs to be: wouldn’t it be better if they thought about things ahead of time? But it turns out that brains are optimized for deciding quickly in response to new information. So cognitive science turns out to be surprisingly useful for solving problems like this one.
A bird’s brain doesn’t look much different from ours, so cognitive scientists have been working on what we would call “birdbrains” as well
You can’t take a joke too seriously.
In the twenty-first century, to be a fashion designer is a respectable job. There are big art galleries and prestigious magazines for which you have to design clothes. People aspire to it. But in the late nineteenth century, being a fashion designer was something that you did as a hobby, if at all. If you didn’t have some serious professional work, it was probably just because you happened to be unlucky in your talent.
The profession was new, and new careers were starting up all the time. Anybody who wanted to make a living making clothes could do it just by putting out their own designs and selling them at two or three cents apiece at penny arcades and on the street. All they needed was sewing skill and access to cotton fabric, which they could get cheap enough that they didn’t need fancy machinery or factories. Anybody could start up as an amateur designer in their spare time. And one of them did: Chicago’s Marshall Field began his career like that.
But there were still plenty of people who weren’t content with an amateur opportunity. And like all new careers, the field of fashion design had its own cliques, its own jargon and customs that would not be allowed anywhere else—the
We are occasionally asked to estimate the cost of some service or product, and we will almost always tell an extravagant price. When someone says, “What is the total cost to my business?,” it often seems like a trick question.
But that’s not the case. This is an important part of the economy. It’s a way to make deals happen: if you think a product or service is worth twice what someone else thinks it’s worth, you’re more likely to ask them to pay it. The price they offer is based on their own guess, which might be less than yours. But if you want them to sell you a product or do a job, you have to bid against someone else who has that same idea. And so you have to be willing to spend more money than that; otherwise you won’t get what you want.
In many cases the difference in cost between two things is just the difference between people’s guesses about how much each thing is worth. In other cases – think of buying a car – there may be something unusual about the new thing and something unusual about you that makes it easy for one person to spend more than another does.