The Chicken Store | intrepid reporter

"I'm an old country boy," the paper quotes him as saying. "Where I come from, if a rooster got too noisy, he got made into chicken soup."

On the other side of the issue is Katha Sheehan. The article reports that Sheehan "wants the city to build a chicken park where children and tourists could enjoy them." But doesn't this nation already have enough chicken parks? The article doesn't address the issue.

Sheehan (whose name is kind of similar to mine, but is nonetheless no relation to me) owns and operates The Chicken Store. I had never heard of a chicken store before, so I put on my fedora and my trench coat, required of all journalists who are about to actually work, and phoned Sheehan to ask the tough question: What is a, or in this case, The Chicken Store? "It's a store that sells chickens and items with a chicken theme, such as T-shirts and coffee mugs," she said.

I smelled a story here. When an intrepid reporter smells a story, he does two things. One, he uses the adjective "intrepid" to describe the word "reporter." (Check.) Two, he digs deeper. "So," I responded, digging deeper (check), "chickens in Key West are a bigger deal than I thought."

Sheehan (who still wouldn't be related to me even if she transposed the "a" with the "ee" in her name) didn't confirm whether they were or weren't a bigger deal than I thought, presumably because she had no way of knowing what I thought. But she did confirm that, yes, chickens were a big deal in Key West.

I knew there was a story here.