La Pulcina Piccola was featured on This American Life’s annual poultry show this week. Love’s Fowl is an opera sung in Italian featuring Chicken Little (La Pulcina Piccola), acted using puppets by the Clothespin Repertory Theater. Unfortunately, the Pulcina site doesn’t have any audio or video clips, but you can hear the entire Poultry ‘99 This American Life show in RealAudio at thislife.org.

Y2Kaos documents one person’s attempts to discover if common household items are Y2K compliant. In the same vein as Letters from a Nut, several companies from Quaker State to Elmer’s Glue were sent emails that in a round-about way asked about Y2K.

The Kooks Museum has been “dismantled, compacted, frozen, laminated and reassembled” for your viewing pleasure. As it’s laminated, no new additions will be made to the museum. In its place is Book Happy, a print magazine with some on-line content about collecting weird books.

The swiss cheese I’m making begins three months of hibernation in the back of my fridge tomorrow. It’s been sitting out for the last three weeks, and indications are that the eyes have formed beautifully. It smells just like a nice swiss cheese, too. I guess I’ll find out for sure in late February.

I’ve agreed to do a review of the Hasbro Interactive Diplomacy game for the Diplomatic Pouch, the webzine for the internet Diplomacy community. First impressions: looks good, great for learning the game, doesn’t come near matching having seven human players sitting around a table.

SPRIL News is the official newsletter of the Subatomic Particle Rights League. This was published in print form by Tom Jones primarily at New Mexico Tech, and consisted mostly of “psuedo-scientific satire”. After Tom left Tech, a few issues were published on-line, including a selection of Dr. Staff’s Greatest Hits. Dr. Staff is/was a scientific genius who taught about a third of all classes offered at Tech (that is, if you went by each semester’s course catalog) who took the time to answer reader’s questions. Tom also served as student body president and editor of the official school newspaper, Paydirt. He brought a new new era of quality to the paper, but having a satirist n charge of the official news brought forth some very interesting issues.

I can’t say enough good things about Mike’s Weblog. The content this last week has been beyond compare, and includes a few places he just beat me to.

French geophysicists have proposed the theory that gravitational tugs by the sun and moon have caused mass volcanism at key times in Earth’s past, the most recent responsible for the rise of the dinosaurs. This article, from the BBC, doesn’t get into any of the details, like why it’s only happened a few times. I need to see the original research I guess to understand this.

Resistance, nothing. I found Diplomacy (see below) on sale, and have already bought it. At first glance it looks real good, but I’ll let you know more as Iplay it.

You Are Where You Live shows off the power of gathering demographics. Type in your zip code and get told what kind of people live there. Where I grew up: “Shotguns & Pickups” and “Back Country Folks”. Yeah, that’s true. Where I live now: “Towns & Gowns” and “Southside City”. If you’re a travelling salesman, you gotta know the territory, and this’ll get you almost all of the way there. (fromRobot Wisdom)