Hey nerdist, saw the call from @wilw to help you in Twitter and the 140 limit is hurting for this kind of thing.
That's the proper .htaccess but your site still isn't rewriting. My guess is mod_rewrite is broken or not compiled. It's possible your host forgot to include it in a recent rebuild of Apache.
If you create a php file with this in it:
<head>
<title>PHP Info</title>
</head>
<body>
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
</body></html>
upload that (as phpinfo.php) to your site's root and then browse to it you can look to see if mod_rewrite is there under "Loaded Modules" in the apache section.
If it's in there then it should be working and your host has something seriously messed up somewhere.
- @joefulgham on twitter