i'm going to be talking to you about the phrase, "
to kill 2 birds with 1 stone". we've all heard it. i've some issues with this phrase. firstly, who's going around throwing stones at birds? if you're going around killing birds with stones, you have issues. if you're going around killing birds with stones so often that you need a more time efficient way of doing it, that is an obsession. we're using the phrase wrong. we use that when we found an easy way of doing 2 things at once to save time. killing 2 birds with 1 stone isn't easy.
just take the physics if it.
you going to have to hit the first bird hard enough already. then, either the stone or the deceased bird, is going to have to ricochet onto the secondary bird. that's not a 1 stone job. if anything, you're going to miss a lot of more birds than if you're just trying to kill 1 bird. we should be using the phrase, "
when you tried to do 2 things at once but it backfired horrifically". for example, washing your reds with your whites. you thought it would save you time, but instead you've screwed yourself there, and now you have to play cricket in pink. that's why the South African team did it back in 2011. they claimed it was for breast cancer awareness...when really, they were trying to killed 2 birds with 1 stone.
i'm not done yet.
now, you might think that was a weirdly dated reference for me to use and quite in congress from someone who obviously doesn't know anything about cricket. see what i did there was i typed the phrase, "
play cricket in pink", into Google. it's what i do if a certain bit isn't good enough yet and i need to pat out my routine. also, i like to add another research to my stand-up so we all learn something along the way. essentially, i derived 2 benefits from 1 singular action.
now - you might be trying to think of some loopholes to make killing 2 birds with 1 stone easier. 1 loophole you might try: siamese birds. fair enough; they do exist. they found a couple back in Arkansas in 2008. however, if your strategy is to wait around for a set of conjoined twin birds, that is equivalent to going to a bar and waiting for siamese twins to show up if you're trying to have a ménage à trois. not an effective strategy, a threesome already quite difficult to obtain. you're going to have to attract 1 partner hard enough already. then, that sexual attraction is going have to ricochet onto the secondary partner. i don't know how sexual attraction works, but i do know projectile physics...and i assume they're the same.
another loophole you might asked, "
what if it's a pregnant bird?" well then you're a moron because birds don't get pregnant. however, let's indulge that idea for a second. let's say a bird were clutching an unborn egg. you killed both the bird and the egg. does that count as killing 2 birds with 1 stone?
debatable!
it's a gray area. turns out it's pretty hard to define when life starts for a bird. some say, it's when the egg is fertilized. other say,
you don't count them 'til they've hatched. that's the slogan for the Avian Pro-Choice campaign by the way. the Avian Pro-Life campaign, their slogan's simply, "
life starts at egg". fair enough. 2 sides to every argument, i say it's not my place as a non-bird, to publicly debate what is primarily a bird issue, in the company of exclusively non-birds.
finally, there is 1 good loophole i thought of. it's when you've seen a bird in a bush. you grab that bird, place it in your hand, and now it's worth double! so you bash it with a stone...and then, ladies and gentlemen, you have killed 2 birds with 1 stone.
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Ken Cheng
