Definitive Answers

Are we really going to keep asking the same questions over and over? Can’t we settle some of these age-old questions?

Q. If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound if no one’s there to hear it?

A. Of course it does.

Q. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?

A. The egg. Because at whatever stage you decide to define a chicken as being a chicken — mutated and evolved from whatever near-chicken precursor laid the egg that hatched it — there was an egg with a forthcoming chicken inside before there was a chicken to lay it. The egg was laid by the precursor to the chicken, which had perhaps spent too much time around a poorly-shielded nuclear power plant. The egg cracks, and to the surprise of the near-chicken, out pops . . . a chicken!

Anything else on your mind?

(For questions like “Why is the sky blue,” where it’s not in dispute, just hard to remember, try http://www.ask.com/ and type, “Why is the sky blue?” For questions having to with your refrigerator’s ice-maker, or any other GE appliance, call 800-626-2000 twenty-four hours a day, press 4, and you get great human service.)