The Cyberactivist

Well, I have cooled down a bit since my rant this morning. Sorry about that, folks. I just had to get that out.

Can we all put it behind us and move on now? That is what I intend to do. I have taken care of my business as far as that went and feel much better now.

I want to get to what I had intended on talking about today before my coffee was so rudely interrupted this morning. Thanks for being there, everyone. Some of the people reading this have been quite helpful and supportive to me. I appreciate it a lot.

Now, back to business as usual.

You know, one of the nastiest things in the world is something I have touched on a bit in the hanging cage, but I haven't talked about what happens out on the runway. At least, not this story.

In between the girders that hold up the roof over the runway, there is a line of big fans. They are those big ones that look kind of like small airplane engines. Well, maybe not quite that big, but it certainly seems that way when they are all turned on because there are probably about a dozen of them, all lined up in a row. Their blades are about 3 feet long and about a foot wide at their widest point. They were about 6 feet across. Really big fans.

I knew this guy once, who would occasionally get his kicks at break time by taking a chicken and setting it on the ledge behind one of these fans that didn't have the safety cover on it. There were usually a few that were missing those, at least on the intake side. This guy would set the chicken on this ledge and sit there and wait to see how long it took before the fan sucked the chicken in and turned it to this goo-like paste with bone shards in it.

It would slow the fan blade down to the point that it would just almost stop. and it would get the first couple of licks on the chicken that way. I just hoped that the first one would kill it. I know there were a few times that the first one didn't kill it outright. Those incidents were the worst.

It would just rip about halfway through its body and sling it around inside the fan half a dozen times or so. The more parts of the chicken it would spit out, the lighter the chicken got, and the faster the fan blade turned. Naturally, the faster the blade turned, the more damage it did, until it chopped it up small enough for all the itty-bitty pieces to pass through the front of the grate on the fan.

The fan's mesh safety grate had square holes in it about 1/4" square. When the bits of ripped up chicken were small enough to fit through holes that small, they would come out in little gooey gobs and pieces.

The worst part of this behavior (that was especially terrifying to the innocent chicken) was also the favorite part of the guy that did this. He got off on watching that poor chicken sit there and hang on to that ledge for dear life, looking in terror at the huge fast-spinning fan blades, before the blades sucked it in and threw out this big spray of blood that went out about 20 feet. That was the sickest part of that act - the sadistic glee he took in the suffering of an innocent, feeling, sentient creature.

He enjoyed seeing the terror in the poor chicken's eyes, while it squawked soundlessly, its cries drowned out by the noise of the fan. You could see its mouth opening, but you couldn't hear its voice.

That is a terrible way to go. And, since those chickens had no voice, I will be it for them. They are not forgotten, at least not by me.