Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Follow-up to : Much Ado About Animals

There has been a bunch of discussion about the chicken and pig story in the scrumdev yahoo group lately. And my friend, Mike Vizdos, uses the chicken and pig metaphor a lot on his site: Implementing Scrum. That's a link to the latest cartoon.

Reminder: Metaphor alert, as described in my previous post on this subject.

At about the same time, my wife bought 4 steel sculptures, 2 of chickens and 2 of pigs. For no known reason (she knows very little about SCrum and I had not mentioned the chicken and pig sory to her). Since I think of the chicken and pig story is a great Aesop fable for children, let me show you the baby chicken and the baby pig first.

Here's the baby pig. I love the authentic rust.
And the screw used for the nose (look closely). Wouldn't you want to be a pig? (Oh, yes, that's right, it's just a story about committed vs. involved. You don't have to be a real pig.)


Now, here's the sculpture of the baby chick.
What do you observe? Seems to want to dominate the little pig (must be a conspiracy there). Seems a bit of an air-head. And, again, rust becomes her (my artistic impression is that this chick is female...apologies to those who disagree). And I don't know what's up with that tail feather.

Was I talking about a real chicken? Was I talking about a real person? No, in both cases. I was talking about a real thing, that picture of a sculpture you see above.

Here's to always inspecting and adapting based on as-close-to-the-real-thing-as-we-can-get.

To increase the level of fun, let me quote from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn:

"PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR,
Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance."
Perhaps he protested too much. You be the judge.

Please tell me if this story or these pictures are amusing to you. They say that education and entertainment have been entwined for thousands of years.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Joe, I love your blog :-D
deb

Joe Little said...

Hi,
Glad you like it so far. If you have topics that you are interested in, you might influence me to discuss them.
Regards, Joe