Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I am in my twenties, when I can so vividly remember being a nervous, sweaty, breast budding tomboy in grammar school, who wanted to wear Bulls Jerseys that came down to the knee, not dresses. And when I look in the mirror, I see a girl who looks slightly older and more hung over than my eighth grade counterpoint—sans braces, pimples and hair wraps. It’s not just that I look young, I feel too young to be doing anything real with my life, too young to make any life decisions, too young to know what I want. This is why it seems perfectly fitting that my mom still runs errands for me, deposits checks for me, buys my underwear and socks. Sometimes I wonder how someone who feels like an eighth grader can already be thinking about jobs after college, auto insurance, and Botox.

My goodness what a looker she was. Eighteen years old, sun red hair, big green eyes, a perfect figure that photos show she wasn’t ashamed of and a steely will built by hard times and a daily struggle to survive.

By now, it was 1944, and it looked like she, her family and all of London were going to survive the war. Annette can describe in detail the faces and the feelings and the sounds of spending endless nights in bomb shelters while air raid sirens wailed and German buzz bombs screamed overhead.

She’ll describe to you in detail just how her soon-to-be husband looked in his snappy U.S. Air Force uniform the first night they met at a dance in East London (she was dating the drummer in the band at the time, a Tony Cromby ...nice enough fellow, but he was no American).

She can paint a picture of 60 years back in time and fill in every stroke and then, this morning, she forgot that she’d moved to Buffalo City six weeks ago.

Today on Dane101 we launch a new feature called "Ask Dr. Answertron." This is our version of an advice column with answers offered in the Dane101 style. If you have something to ask concerning you life - fire away and Dr. Answertron will set you on the right path. Please try to keep questions a bit shorter than this one. For the time being send questions to "info (at) dane101 (dot) com). "Ask Dr. Answertron" will be alternating with two other columns that will be starting in the coming weeks.

The City of Madison Fire Department is still investigating the early morning fire at Pincus McBride, but an anonymous first account comment over at Pixelated Imagination suggests it may have been caused by fireworks. Comment reposted below and followed by the text of the press release just issued by the CFMD (you can also download it as an attachment to this article):

Apologies for not getting this up on Thursday. Below are highlights from the three most controversial license reviews at the April 18 meeting of the City of Madison's Alcohol License Review Committee. Attached to this write up is a copy of the minutes.

Item 10: Open Pantry Food Mart, 2201 S. Park Street. Denied granting a license to the new owner of the Open Pantry at 2201 S. Park Street “because granting the license would be contrary to the health, safety, and welfare of the community."

District 14 Alder Tim Bruer was in attendance speaking against granting the license, “no site is more sensitive then this particular site.” Bruer pointed out that alcohol was available around multiple corners from the Food Pantry and that the community had been working hard to reduce liquor licenses in the area.

The Regional Economic Development Entity (REDE) was launched in February with the great ambition of turning a nine county region in south central Wisconsin into an attractive place for big national businesses. Nearly two months later, it still doesn’t have a website, a full staff or a proper name. But the $2.6 million it has raised since last October – most of it from the private sector – assures REDE three years of funding, with an $800,000 annual operating budget.

That’s an great start for an endeavor many are excited about. Based on the concept of communities working together rather than competing, the nine counties under REDE’s purview – known collectively as the Wisconsin Capital Region – believe that pooling their resources for a common cause will enrich their quality of life and enhance their economic standing. Moreover, they want a stake in the global market.

I love Madison's love of food. What I love even more is the efforts of so many in Madison to celebrate this city's devine love of food.

Tonight commences the first annual Restaurant Week right here in Madison, Wisconsin. The event will be lasting all week, Sunday January 28 through Friday, February 2! For the next six days, an array of restaurants in Madison and the surrounding areas will be offering specialized menus to all of its customers. For only $25 per person restaurants will have three delightfully delicious three course meals for customers to choose from. An appetizer, entree and dazzling dessert from some of Madison's most prestigious restaurants! The details of these menus can be found at Madison Magazine. (I highly suggest that reservations be made!)

Enlighten your Palate: Mis en Place

Madison is such a unique city, and ever since I've moved here I've been eager to explore the many different aspects of food surrounding such a beautiful city. Each and everyday I am interested in learning about some new type of food. Whether it be squash, chocolate, tomatoes, or ice cream, I'm always wanting to learn more about the many diverse flavors, styles and techniques of cooking. Thus I have decided to develop a new column, titled as above, "Enlighten your Palate". Every article will evolve around one particular ingredient, cuisine, or idea about food. Most of the time the food will also have some sort of intimate connection to our beloved city. I will try to research information about my current curiosity and then provide you with my own opinions and culinary creations. I would definitely love it if opinions and suggestions about article topics were thrown my way.

Madison's Craigslist arrived shortly after Dane101 was launched last year. When it first popped up we would on occasion take a peak at the site to see how it was being utilized. We decided to revisit that feature today by scanning through the "missed connections" section. Below are some of our favorites complete with commentary:

Translation: I'm way too cheap to buy a drink for both you and your friend.

When former major league slugger-turned-tattle-tale Jose Canseco released his book of sensational steroid stories last year, Congress, seizing the chance to prove “ethics” was still part of its vernacular, quickly admonished the accused. Summoned to Washington, disgraced record setters sat aside less-accomplished players as politicians pontificated on the virtues of fairness, heroism and leadership.

Some players denied using steroids, while others indirectly pled the fifth. Shame was cast equally among them, as were the indignities of their receding greatness. The asterisk on Roger Maris’ homerun record indicating he played a longer season than record-setter Babe Ruth paled to the humility of one that now branded them cheaters.

The national uproar fanned by accusations that super-sluggers Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds used performance-enhancing drugs never materialized into a rational debate about steroid use. Rather, players were scolded, they’re legacies tarnished and their wrists slapped. The hearings concluded without having changed much. And as the 2005 baseball season came and went, the steroid scandal had all but fallen to a murmur.

Until now.

A Isthmus Daily Page forum thread is all abuzz with the speed dating event being hosted by Flirting in the City at the Cardinal Bar on St. Patrick’s Day. The primary issue? The age ranges of the two dating groups being paired off:

Dane101 contacted Kristi Moe, founder of Flirting in the City, to get to the bottom of the debate. She says it has nothing to do with stereotypes and she changes the dating ranges with each event she hosts based on feedback from speed daters. Essentially, it is all about mixing up the pool. If you have the same event every month with the same age groups, the water will get a little stagnant.

Within an hour of opening for enrollment last spring, professor Tomislav Longinovic’s pilot course on vampires hit capacity. The course was designed in part to drum up interest in UW-Madison’s Slavic languages program, which struggles to attract students. Loosely modeled on the few existing vampire courses offered around the country, Longinovic wasn’t surprised by how fast the class filled up. People, he said, have a thing for the folkloric demon.

Vampires might not come to mind when considering scholarly pursuits, but in 1995, while working on a Slavic literary history project with a Canadian research group, the vampire’s broad metaphorical reach became obvious to Longinovic. Last year he published his seminal Vampires Like Us (ed. note: clicking the link will open a pdf file of Vampires like us: Gothic imaginary and "the serbs"), an expose on the conceptual transformations the vampire has undertaken as a figure of global imagination. The book is also the first academic inquiry into the vampire’s role as a nationalist icon, Balkan nationalism in particular.

Born and raised in Belgrade, Longinovic holds degrees in creative writing, psychology and has his Ph.D in comparative literature. He came to UW-Madison in 1990, where he has taught Eastern European history and the incredibly-difficult-to-learn Slavic languages. Not only do Slavic languages use a different alphabet, the languages are inflected and nouns take on 13 forms. Considering this semester’s success of his Vampire in Literature and Film, he hopes to grow the class into a lecture course and open it to a wider cross-section of students.

Longinovic sat recently with Dane101 to discuss the folkloric roots of vampires, how they entered Western popular culture and why they’re such alluring figures for filmmakers and writers.

In 1954, three years after the Menominee Indian tribe was awarded $8.5 million by the federal government for its mismanaging the tribe’s logging operations in the 1890s, President Eisenhower absolved U.S. jurisdiction over the Menominee and ended its tribal sovereignty under a policy called Termination. Because of the payout, the government believed the Menominee had money enough to become a self-sustaining society. But within a few years it was evident the policy was another in a ongoing series of abysmal failures, again at the expense of an endangered race.

The impact of the Menominee Indian Reservation becoming Menominee County in the spring of 1961 was felt almost immediately. Without federal subsidies, the county’s only hospital shut down. Unemployment soared, as did poverty and alcoholism. Fewer Indians graduated from high school and just a small handful carried on through college. Incapable of providing its residents with basic services, Menominee County stank of all the torments unleashed on America’s indigenous peoples since Europeans first trespassed its shores 500 years earlier. The policy of Termination, it seemed, was less figurative than originally assumed. And for nearly a decade the Menominee suffered greatly under it.

By the late 1960s it was clear that the Bureau of Indian Affairs – an agency with roots in pre-revolutionary America, and which was tasked with implementing the modern Termination policy – wasn’t going to fix the problem voluntarily. So, a small group of Menominee, led by 44-year-old Ada Deer, launched a grassroots campaign against the agency. Deer, the first Menominee to graduate from UW-Madison, earned her masters in social work from Columbia University the same year the reservation she grew up on was dissolved. Having grown up in the clutches of poverty, Deer wasn’t going to stand watch over a bad situation made worse.

This weekend Sara on Working for the Weekend shared her experience using face recognition technology on MyHeritage.com to find out the celebrity she resembles most is Hillary Clinton. The genealogy website is using the celebrity matching gimmick as a promotional tool in preparation for launching the technology to help build family trees. Hypothetically, your face should match up with others in your family line. The site explains how it works:

While the celebrity matching has mixed results, Dane101 thought it would be fun to randomly select some local public figures and throw them in the kettle. For example, we found that Mayor Dave Cieslewicz has a facial structure that closely matches Monty Python actor John Cleese. Another close match for the mayor was X-Files star David Duchovny. For more matches, click “read more.”

UPDATE Now featuring video!

Early last Monday Dane101 was one of the first to notify you of the impending zombie invasion. The report came thanks to a tip by local zombie blogger Madolan who caught wind of the hordes impending descent on the city. While some local papers did pick up on the coming attack city officials were slow to react, preoccupied with trying to decide how to fend off a onslaught of live hordes on Halloween.