Well, a quick one to answer the Frequently Asked Questions in my previous post about Daniel.

1) Yes, he knows about the other residents of the Manor of Mixed Blessings. Not like I could hide them! But since he has never visited here before, he will meet them for the first time in Feb.

2) He has had cats growing up but not dogs. Dogs may be a shock to him.

3) Yes, he knows that Tink has right of Veto on anyone attempting to move in here but

4) Of course I'm going to cheat and stack the deck by filling his pockets with cookies.

5) The dogs have never seen anyone as large as him before I don't think. It should be interesting.

Just submitted Big Lebowski Burlesque to the Chicago Fringe Festival!
http://www.chicagofringe.org/

Wish us luck!
xo

Annie

Here’s what I discovered after a day of using the current beta of Google Chrome for Mac:

• It frequently lost the text cursor in text input fields, especially on GMail.
• It seemed much slower and more likely to corrupt the display compared to Safari in Google Wave.
• It had a bad habit of undocking a tab on the slightest provocation.
• The fact that the tabs take up space in the window frame means that you’d frequently undock a tab when you were trying to move the whole window.
• It doesn’t have a “Reload all tabs” option. Supposedly there is an extension to that, but in order to use extensions I’d have to upgrade to the latest development build. That’s more work than I’m willing to do when it has all these other problems.
• It doesn’t recognize or tell you about RSS feeds. In Safari or Firefox, any page that has an RSS feed displays an icon, and if you click it, the OS opens the feed in the currently configured RSS reader. The functionality is so ingrained in browsers that many pages don’t seem to have any other indication that they have RSS feeds. Once again, I’m told that Chrome has a plug in for that. Once again, too much trouble.

About the only thing I liked about Chrome more than Safari is that when I restarted it, it would re-open the three pages with 15 or so tabs between them that I had open beforehand. Safari can be trained to open the one page with 10 tabs that is my main window, but then I have to manually fiddle with the other pages. Oh, and Chrome opens new links in a tab instead of a window – that’s nice that I don’t have to hold down command when I click.

The main reason I was tempted to use Chrome is that using a busy wave in Google Wave causes browsers to eat memory like crazy. In Safari, to recover that memory I have to close the whole browser. In Chrome, you can recover it by closing the tab. Nice, but I was closing the tab and re-opening it every few minutes because the “space to next unread blip” functionality would stop working. I have to restart Safari about once a week if I avoid Wave, and about once a day if I use Wave.

I find it deeply ironic that the two biggest problems I had with Chrome were with Google apps. Maybe I’ll come back to Chrome when it’s ready. But not now.

Originally posted at Rants and Revelations

So it's probably about time for me to check in and say, yes, we're still alive.  I'm sure there were lots of things I could have posted about between the first day of school and today (Evan's adjustment to kindergarten, for instance), but, well, it's rare that I manage to muster the enthusiasm to post a status update to Facebook.

( So let's talk about December... )

http://www.sciencemadecool.com/2010/01/happy-400th-birthday-to-the-medicean-stars.html

On January 7, 1610, Galileo Galilei first reported his discovery of three new stars, as he watched the planet Jupiter through his new telescope. This was moderately big news, since telescopic astronomy was brand-new and pretty much every time you...

Old age (15).

I'm going to sleep, and so I will leave you with something sure to give you sweeeeeet dreams. Lookie, lookie at all those great costumes!!



Ya dig? Well, Donna's got 188 votes on the VLV13 site - so maybe we can help her get to 222 and be in the lead? I think so! Yes, I do! :)

Vote here - no worries, you won't get on a mailing list or anything:
http://www.vivalasvegas.net/intranet/vote_main.php

Sweet dreams, my loves!
xo

Annie

Lookie who got a makeover! http://windycityburlesquefest.com/ - care of the ever-talented Donna Touch - performer applications due Feb 1

Blogging that has nothing to do with me. Except tangentially.
( A Reprint: The Ballad of Rooney Lee, First Verse )
( The Ballad of Rooney Lee: Second Verse, Same as the First. Whole lot louder and a whole lot worse! )

I read about at least 4 books while on vacation, and I want to share my recommendations with you. Not trying to be Oprah or some shit, but I gots my opinions, too, yo. You'll see below an equal split of smut & alleged intelligent reading:

The Early Ayn Rand

http://www.amazon.com/Early-Ayn-Rand-Selection-Unpublished/dp/045121465X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262718974&sr=8-1

This is a book I thoroughly enjoyed. It was interesting to read some of Ayn Rand's early attempts at writing about her philosophy. Even in her early stuff, where she's just got a basic grasp on the english language, she's still precise in her meanings - one of the things that I dig about Ayn Rand. I thought I wouldn't like the Editor's Preface before each story, but it got to the point where I looked forward to reading his opinions before I read the story. I felt like I got more out of each one that way. I'm fairly certain, having read this book, I've now read all of her fiction work. Next up, genuine philosophy books...and maybe some biography books.

---

Cake Wrecks

http://www.amazon.com/Cake-Wrecks-Professional-Cakes-Hilariously/dp/0740785370/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262719182&sr=1-1

This was a surprise favorite. I picked it up at Borders a couple days into our trip, and I laughed so loud I was embarrassed. It's a coffee-table type book, which - in spite of the copious quantities I own - I tend to find only mildly entertaining. This one, however, takes the cake! HILARIOUS HILARIOUS HILARIOUS. I literally laughed to tears two times (and people who know me personally know that's a true rarity!). The gal who wrote it has the kind of sense of humor that reminds me of one of my friends.
Even better? The website: http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/

---

The Scarlet Letter

http://www.amazon.com/Scarlet-Letter-Nathaniel-Hawthorne/dp/1442140712/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262719495&sr=8-1

Okay, I somehow missed this one in High School. And I'm glad I did. Although I really loved the basis for the story, I found Nathaniel Hawthorne's writing to incredibly DULL! I'm going to go out on a limb and say that no adjective should be repeated at least 5 times in a 235 page book, especially if that adjective is "tremulous." Having said that, and considering how enlightened the viewpoints were at the time it was written, I'm glad I read it.

---

Jenna Jameson: How to Make Love Like a Porn Star

http://www.amazon.com/Make-Love-Like-Porn-Star/dp/0060539100/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1262719675&sr=1-1

This was the last one I read on vacation, during the airplane ride from Hawaii to LAX. Considering the size of the book, it's (not surprisingly) a very simple read. I loved the way it started, but I felt like it really fell off the tracks. I was utterly BORED during the parts with the dialogue between her/her father/her brother. I had to really control the impluse to skip past those bits. It got back on track for a while after that, but then in the part where she described her current relationship, she lost me again. I thought she had a lot of insights, but there were parts that were dull/nostalgic and toward the end, it's sort of wrapped up with a "Happy Ending" that I don't find conceivable, let alone withstanding the test of time.
I mean, is this going to be a book that she revisits in 5 years with a totally different "Happy Ending"? I think it's awfully daring to write a book that ends with "I found my husband and he's perfect for me," when there are parts of the book that span 6 months that are more bipolar than a confused bear. I sympathized with her when she was in/out of addiction to meth and in/out of relationships and her abuse, but when I looked at the timeline to each one, it was a matter of months. Personally, I'd think twice before making a grand "Happy Ending" to a book if I though there was a potential to put my foot in my mouth a couple months later!
Yet, there's something to be said for Faith in fairy tale endings! :)
Honestly, I wish the book was about half the size, and I wish the editor had chopped it in half, keeping all the pictures. I really *LOVED* about 50% of the book. The other half was just so tedious.

Nina Metz says we linger in her mind:
http://online.performink.com/features/50-theatre/185-yir-2009-metz

Wait til you see what we're cooking for 2010! ;)
xo

Annie

My girl, Donna Touch, is going to rock VLV13 - but she needs some more votes - let's get her up to 120 votes tonight:
http://www.vivalasvegas.net/intranet/vote_main.php

I've voted for a couple years, and never gotten spammed by them - so please help a sista out and drop your vote TONIGHT! One vote per IP address!
xo

Annie

There are two cow skulls in the back of my car. I think I'm going to mount one on a post around the front of the Blight, put a chunk of tree in front of it with some dribbly candles for ambience, set a ring of garden gnomes around it, then sit back and wait for the neighbors to call the sheriff.

I'm thinkin I should use the other one for a desk organizer (pens in the nasal cavities, tiny post-it-notes in the eye sockets) because my team just got a new boss at work. Shock, shock, surprise, surprise, it's an old white guy. The last person in the position was a young white guy who was at least prior Navy. But I am so. fucking. tired. of old white dudes on a professional level, y'all. Because they never ever fucking take it on faith that a woman in her early 30s who spent 9 years, 7 months, and 1 day in the Navy, 2 years of that LEARNING ABOUT THIS SYSTEM and then four years being in charge of DOING THE MAINTENANCE ON IT and oh yeah then USING IT FOR THE PURPOSE FOR WHICH THE DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE INTENDED and then spending the past two years WRITING FUCKING TECHNICAL DOCUMENTATION ON IT actually, y'know, knows anything about the system.

No, I always end up having to do the ridiculous dance of patronization while they try to treat me like their daughter and I resist the urge to stab their fucking old white guy eyeballs out with my editing PEN OF DOOM. And then blah blah blah and they mention some piece of documentation to me condescendingly and I'm all "YOU MEAN THAT THING I WROTE?" and some of them then have the good grace to look abashed by their own idiocy but seriously do. not. want. to. deal.

So I'm thinking the best way to get Mr. New Old White Dude to just leave me the hell alone is to organize all my desk paraphenalia in a cow skull, which will sit next to the 30" light up penguin. I can perch my John Brown doll on it triumphantly or some shit.

Oh and we hired a new engineer, too. You'll be fucking shocked to hear he's another old white dude. He gets bonus points for not even knowing how to make small talk at the sink in the kitchen when a 30-something woman is involved.

Jesus Jumped-Up Christ on a fuckin pogo stick, y'all. Ima go back to school and get me a nice stereotypically feminine job in academia, studying the Civil War--OH WAIT.

http://www.sciencemadecool.com/2010/01/kepler-delivers.html

A little more than a year ago I reported on the Kepler mission -- an orbiting telescope dedicated to searching for extrasolar planets. Well, NASA's announced that Kepler has made its first hits. The satellite has so far identified five...

clicky click for more

Chicago burlesque dancer Red Hot Annie - redhotannie.com by Brian Kim - www.briankimphoto.com/

Dress by BombshellShocked.

Honolulu, December 2009

Chicago Burlesque