"Anytime you see him scrambling around like a chicken with his head cut off, it's shocking, because you don't see it very often, " defensive lineman Trevor Pryce said.

WSJ: A Defensive Masterpiece

' Over a dinner of a chicken impaled and roasted on a spike, its head still attached, with fiddlehead ferns and whole sprouting peanuts, the owner of the plantation put a different angle to me: 'Picking tea - it's women's work - it always has been.

BBC: Here be dragons

As Bob Reischauer, a former head of the Congressional Budget Office, puts it, both sides are indulging in a game of chicken.

ECONOMIST: Budgetary follies