rebelguru - No, no, no. ;-)
You are mixing up two different things, rewriting permalinks and redirecting your old URLs, and that's why it's going haywire. If you're using WordPress's pretty permalinks, you'll need the standard rewrite block for those, which looks like this:
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress
That is rewriting (not redirecting) WordPress's standard "ugly" permalinks - such as http://example.com/?p=N - to a nicer format, such as http://example.com/your-page-name/
Above that block of code (as ipstenu said earlier) you can add the redirects, one line per URL. This is redirecting URLs from your old site to the new WordPress site.
Example:
Redirect 301 /archives/2374 http://www.g33kpron.com/twitter-infographic/
Repeat, adding one line per old page/post.