Cutting up fowl to predict the future is, if done honestly and with as little interpretation as possible, a kind of randomization. But chicken guts are hard to read and invite flights of fancy or corruption.

It is so hard to make important decisions that we have a great urge to reduce them to rules.

Risk analysis can cater to any sort of hazard, but their profession owes its existence to a relatively narrow band of possible dangers.

Life on a factory farm is well-nigh unbearable for the animals or birds, and it is often foul for the women and men who process the meat that results - especially in factories for chicken parts. But do not sentimentalize. Do not imagine barnyard life is a bowl of cherries.

What are the relationships between power and knowledge? There are two bad, short answers: 1. Knowledge provides an instrument that those in power can wield for their own ends. 2. A new body of knowledge brings into being a new class of people or institutions that can exercise a new kind of power.

Quite honestly, it takes a mayor a lot of guts to sit down and do this kind of show. But it's the old get-out-of-the-kitchen-if-you- can't-take-the-heat kind of thing.