house of lies

I kind of like it when kids lie to me. Hmm. I should be more clear: I do not like it when kids tell obvious lies, like, "we're allowed to kick each other in the balls." I do like it, though, when kids tell the kind of lie where it's not clear they know they're even lying. Maybe they just have an active imagination, or they think they heard something but it was translated in their little brains incorrectly.

Anyway, I love conversations like these, brought to us by lies:

Arjun: I found a baby tarantula in my backyard.
James: What did you do with it?
Arjun: I took it to the Junior Museum, but they didn't want it, so I killed it, because I thought the mother would come back and kill me.
Amy: I once found a black widow spider in my garage, and it had an egg sack. I captured it and put it in a cage.
James: What happened to it?
Amy: Oh, it escaped.
Arjun: Well, you can't put a spider in a cage.
James: Did it bite anyone?
Amy: No, I think it just ran away.
James: Once, when I was walking through my yard, a preying mantis jumped up on me.
Arjun: Preying mantises are cannibals. They eat each other's heads off.
Amy: But only the women eat the men, right?
Arjun: Yeah. But Preying mantises can live without their heads.
James: Like chickens. They can live without their heads.
Amy: Really?
James: Yeah. Once, these scientists cut the head off of a chicken, and they kept it alive for over a year by feeding it in the tubes in its neck. And it could still talk, because it had its voice box, and it sounded like this (noise like a muffled rooster).
Amy: It lived for a year? Without a head? Where did you hear about this chicken?
James: On the Discovery Channel.
Amy: Did they talk about any other animals?
James: No, only the chicken.

There was just no reasoning with the kid. Apparently, he was a member of the Cult of the Headless Chicken. I asked several leading questions, like: don't living things need brains? But, apparently, they don't.