Y'alls need to...

...fix your e-mails on your profile so I can personally reply to your comments! Dadgummit!

A bunny in your box is a good thing!

But Dear Mister Wise Rabbit the Super Geek, how do we do that? 

Well, lemme tell ya...

Go to your Dashboard.  Click on Edit Profile.  Then under Privacy - three bloops down - click on that little box next to Show My Email Address.  Now peek over yonder to the left, you will see something like this:  Currently set to theblogs@rabbitythings.com.  This is where, when you comment, people can email you their personal replies rather than replying in the original comment section.

But Dear Mister Wise Rabbit the Super Geek, I don't want my REAL email showing to every Tom, Dick, and Suzy!!!  They might crawl through the webbernets and sit inside my monitor, sucking on jelly beans and thinking untoward and lascivious thoughts while watching me from inside there while I peruse Etsy for handmade Granny Panties and listen to Liberace cover-tunes as performed by limbless children... 

Not to worry Rabbiteers!  A solution is at hand.

Scroll down just a little titch to the Identity section.  See just below User Name there's a box for Email Address.  You can put whatever creams your Twinkie in there.  You can create a new email address just for your blog comments to the licks of BubbaGumpHumpsIt@SquishyShrimp.com (not a real email) if you want to.  It matters not!  What matters is you have a email there (that you can check, of course) to receive your comment replies.

Then once you have done all that, slide on down to the bottom of the page like Smiley Virus on a stripper pole and slap that Save Profile button!   

Voila! (Or "Walla" as Mom says!) You gotcha yourself some faincy-panted high-falutin' place for the folks to holler atcha at!

You're welcome,

More random Geekery for the next time you're bumpin' uglies with Alex Trebek.

A playwright, also known as a dramatist, is a person who writes dramatic literature or drama. These works are usually written to be performed in front of a live audience by actors. They may also be closet dramas or literary works written using dramatic forms but not meant for performance.

The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder (as in a wheelwright or cartwright). Hence the prefix and the suffix combine to indicate someone who has wrought words, themes, and other elements into a dramatic form, someone who crafts plays. The homophone with write is in this case entirely coincidental.

Now you know.

Great vs. Grateful

My inner geek has been rummaging again - the whole great/grateful spelling thing has been driving me bonkers.  And, actually, had one thought about it, the answer was quite simple...

Grateful is a derivative of Gratitude.  Hence the "grat..."  I.e. Full of Gratitude.  Not full of greatness.  Duh.  I'd never really considered the actually meaning of either word.  Had I, it might have been easier to figure out. Though they sound phonetically similar, they are not the same thing...

So now you know (in case you cared).  This has been a public service announcement.

Colour Your World!

This is a fun one from the booking of faces that I came across this morning. You should do your own and leave a comment here. Will keep a running tab of links to everyone that participates! I love colour!

The questions are:

1. What's the first color you see in the morning?
2. What color are your eyes?
3. What color do you wear the most?
4. What color do you never wear?
5. What color do you wear when you want to feel sexy?
6. What color gets you the most compliments?
7. What color is your lipstick?
8. What color was your living room when you were growing up?
9. What color was your bedroom when you were growing up?
10. What color are your sheets?
11. What color was/were your favorite crayon(s) as a child?
12. What color is your car?
13. What color was your prom dress/tux?
14. What's your favorite gemstone?
15. What is your favorite flower?
16. What color makes you happiest?
17. What color depresses you?
18. What color calms you?
19. What color makes you grind your teeth?
20. What color would you like to try, but are scared to?

And my answers are:

I ♥ the Em Dash

Either my boredom — or my geekery — has reached new heights.  Am sitting here in the dark with an ice pack on my foot reading articles online about punctuation. 

Yes, I am that much of a nerd.  (I read the dictionary for fun...) 

But!  In case you are ever on Jeopardy, did you know:

The em dash (—), or m dash, m-rule, etc., often demarcates a parenthetical thought—like this one—or some similar interpolation.

It is also used to indicate that a sentence is unfinished because the speaker has been interrupted. For example, the em dash is used in the following way in Joseph Heller's Catch-22:

He was Cain, Ulysses, the Flying Dutchman; he was Lot in Sodom, Deirdre of the Sorrows, Sweeney in the nightingales among trees. He was the miracle ingredient Z-147. He was—
"Crazy!" Clevinger interrupted, shrieking. "That's what you are! Crazy!"
"—immense. I'm a real, slam-bang, honest-to-goodness, three-fisted humdinger. I'm a bona fide superman."

Similarly, it can be used instead of an ellipsis to indicate aposiopesis, the rhetorical device by which a sentence is stopped short not because of interruption but because the speaker is too emotional to continue, such as Darth Vader's line "I sense something, a presence I have not felt since—" in Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

The term em dash derives from its defined width of one em, which is the length, expressed in points, by which font sizes are typically specified. Thus in 9-point type, an em is 9 points wide, while the em of 24-point type is 24 points wide, and so on. (By comparison, the en dash, with its 1-en width, is ½ em wide in most fonts.[9])

The em dash is used in much the way a colon or set of parentheses is used: it can show an abrupt change in thought or be used where a full stop (or "period") is too strong and a comma too weak. Em dashes are sometimes used in lists or definitions, but that is a style guide issue; a colon is often recommended for use instead.

According to most American sources (e.g., The Chicago Manual of Style) and to some British sources (e.g., The Oxford Guide to Style), an em dash should always be set closed (not surrounded by spaces). But the practice in some parts of the English-speaking world, also the style recommended by The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (due to the narrow width of newspaper columns), sets it open (separates it from its surrounding words by using spaces  or hair spaces (U+200A)) when it is being used parenthetically. Some writers, finding the em dash unappealingly long, prefer to use an open-set en dash. This "space, en dash, space" sequence is also the predominant style in German and French typography. See En dash versus em dash below.

In Canada, The Canadian Style [A Guide to Writing and Editing], The Oxford Canadian of Grammar, Spelling & Punctuation, Guide to Canadian English Usage [Second Edition], Editing Canadian English Manual, and the Canadian Oxford Dictionary are all defined NO SPACE before after these Em Dash marks when they are inserted between words, a word and numeral, or two numerals.

Monospaced fonts (such as Courier) that mimic the look of a typewriter have the same width for all characters. Some of these fonts have em and en dashes which more or less fill the monospaced width they have available. For example, "- – — −" will show as a hyphen, en dash, em dash, and minus in a monospace font. Typewriters often only have a single hyphen glyph, so it is common to use two monospace hyphens strung together--like this--to serve as an em dash.

When an actual em dash is unavailable—as in the ASCII character set—a double ("--") or triple hyphen-minus ("---") is used. In Unicode, the em dash is U+2014 (decimal 8212). In HTML, one may use the numeric forms — or —; there is also the HTML entity —. In TeX, the em dash may normally be input as a triple hyphen-minus (---). On any Mac, most keyboard layouts map an em dash to Shift-Option-hyphen. On Microsoft Windows, an em dash may be entered as Alt+0151, where the digits are typed on the numeric keypad while holding the Alt key down. It can also be entered into Microsoft Office applications by using the Ctrl-Alt-hyphen combination.

Fascinating.  I love it!   And now you know!

Random Geekery for Personal Reference

Blogger has several keyboard shortcuts you can use while editing posts. They definitely work in Internet Explorer 5.5+/Windows and the Mozilla family (1.6+ and Firefox 0.9+), and might work in other browsers. Here they are:

• control + b = Bold
• control + i = Italic
• control + l = Blockquote (when in HTML-mode only)
• control + z = Undo
• control + y = Redo
• control + shift + a = Link
• control + shift + p = Preview
• control + d = Save as Draft
• control + p = Publish Post
• control + s = Autosave and keep editing

If you use Google’s Blogger platform, head on to draft.blogger.com and you’ll find several new interesting features for your blog. Besides some minor updates and bug fixes, they are:

* Webmaster Tools Verification lets you automatically verify all your blogs on Google’s Webmaster Tools.
* Star ratings let you add a 0–5 star rating control to the bottom of your posts.
* Import / export of blogs; a very nice backup option which enables you to create a full backup of your blog which saves into a single XML file.
* Embedded comment form, with support for Google Account and OpenID authentication.
* New post editor, with drag-and-drop image placement and better HTML handling.

These features are still labeled as beta, so don’t be surprised if something goes wrong. Based on user feedback, Google will enable them for everyone when they’re bug-free.