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Went to the Emilie Autumn show at the Granada Theater here in Lawrence last night, accompanied by the_themiscyran and, as a last-minute addition, Dotta Numba 2.

Great show — As a fan of her music, I knew what I was going to hear, but I didn’t expect what I was going to see. Ms. Autumn and her 4 “Bloody Crumpets” (Captain Maggot, Naughty Veronica, Aprella the Murderess and the Blessed Contessa) put on a full-blown steampunk cabaret, with improv, aerial acrobatics, fire dancing, costume changes, ribbon dancing… and tea.

There are already a couple of Youtube clips from last night’s show:

First up, my favorite instrumental, “Unlaced” (a piece for synth, harpsichord, electric violin… and, of course, canes and stilt-walking):

(Trust me – the video says the song is “Manic Depression”, but it’s “Unlaced.”)

and the remix song that she’s got on the soundtrack to “Saw IV”, “Dead Is The New Alive (Manipulator Mix)”, which features some fire-eating from The Contessa and some brilliant fire-hoop dancing from Captain Maggot:

Well, I’ve had a chance to play around with it a bit.

Overall, I’m not particularly impressed. It does what it says on the tin, of course — it handles the functions of email and IM/chat, and if you embed waves in websites, you can do blogs and wikis, etc…. but I’m not really seeing the need to replace all of those separate tools with a single application.

Wave will only turn out to be the “killer ap” if everyone ends up using it instead of email/chat/blogs/livejournal/facebook, etc. …and I honestly don’t see that happening.

Right now, having an “all-in-one” tool is nice, but not really necessary, since the other tools work just fine. I mean, it’s possible to have a combined hammer, saw, screwdriver, drill and spanner, but nobody has bothered to make one since the separate tools are widely used, easily available and well-suited to their particular jobs.

Having said that — I’ve got invites, if anyone out there still wants one. Drop me a line or a comment.

Everything I was going to write on this topic, my friend Steve has already said, and said well.

Civil Rights are not a matter of majority vote. If we had allowed that, the South would still be segregated (legally, I mean — we all know that it still is, culturally speaking).

I want leadership from Obama on this issue — citing the necessity of equality in federal income tax laws (where married couples enjoy a lower tax rate than singles, and yet the legal gay marriages in several states are not permitted to file as married, due to the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act), I want him to sign an executive order, mandating federally-recognized civil unions nation wide.

The right-wing, of course, would lose their fucking minds. But guess what? They’re going to do that no matter what he does. Fuck ’em.