>http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/t/TheJargonLexicon.html
>
>"wave a dead chicken /v./ To perform a ritual in the direction of crashed
>software or hardware that one believes to be futile but is nevertheless
>necessary so that others are satisfied that an appropriate degree of
>effort has been expended. "I'll wave a dead chicken over the source
>code, but I really think we've run into an OS bug." Compare voodoo
>programming, rain dance"

Interesting interpretation.  For our own "dead fish" analogy, I took
it to mean that sensible experiments aimed at fixing a bug were
not being successful, and that waving a dead fish over it seemed to
correlate with success about as much.

I see that the "compare to" entries allude to this sort of thing.

Barry

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