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Good morning all, and welcome to Radio Free Monday! Who's not prepared today? OH ME. Still, gettin' it done.

Ways To Give

Mary let me know about kmo, whose cat was shot this weekend. Mocha will likely need to have her leg amputated, which will run Kmo about $3000 in Maryland -- or about $300 in Arkansas. So tomorrow she's driving with Mocha to Arkansas, where they'll do the amputation. You can read more here plus see the pretty horrific x-ray. Any financial help you can give for a victim of circumstance is appreciated.

News To Use

Via Anon: A branch of the Arizona Minutemen, a civilian militia who have taken it upon themselves to patrol the Mexican-US border, decided to go one step further and start raiding drug smuggling operations. They invaded a private home, shot a man, wounded his wife, and killed their young daughter (Wikipedia article here). There's very little news coverage about the trial that's currently going on, but it's something everyone should know about.

snufflesdbear tipped me off about a new HUD proposal to protect equal housing access "regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity". This is something you may want to keep an eye on.

lokifan gave me a heads up that Diacon Alley (not to be confused with Diagon Alley, the fic site, two different things) is holding a Harry Potter fancon in Canterbury, England, this July. You can check out more info at the LJ comm; any profit made from the con is going to Amnesty International, which is nice. Loki's happy to answer questions about the con in comments on the LJ version of this post, too.

Cool Stuff For You!

Candlemark & Gleam, with whom I have a rather long partnership of going "eee!" over ebooks, has a new book release tomorrow: Broken, by Susan Jane Bigelow. It's a superhero story with a twist, and it looks fascinating. As an incentive to Cafe members to bookmark and check back tomorrow, she's offering a discount code for Broken or for Erekos, C&G's first release: 15% off the price when you use the code SAMSCAFE1. HOW COOL IS THAT.

Via sirlig, Rassaku is moving back to the US from Japan and has books to give away!

And this has been Radio Free Monday! Thank you for your time. You can always post items for my attention in comments here (or on any post) or email me at copperbadge at gmail dot com (PMs are kind of a bad way to reach me). If you're not sure how to proceed, here is a little more about what I do and how you can help. Remember, non-embedded links are love.

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The small mysteries one learns as the office boy are pointless but strange. One of the meanest people in the whole company got a package today and, because I was curious, I googled the company it came from. Self help books! I wonder if she wants to be nicer. Or maybe self-help is how she got this mean, I don't know.

There was an article in this month's Chicago Magazine about The Chicago Code, which is a police procedural set and filmed in Chicago (occasionally ON MY DAMN BLOCK). The first time I heard about the premise I thought it was destined for stupidity and failure, so I decided to ignore it as much as possible.

During drywork today, though, I skimmed the article, because it was a puff four-paragraph piece blown up to a full page. I found one interesting quote -- Shawn Ryan, one of the executive producers, said: "When I pitched it, I viewed it as a police show. Now I view it as a city show through the lens of police officers."

So I might not totally shun it, because I do love shows where the city is a part of things. Besides, I want to see if that one shot caught me walking home from work in the background.

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This evening I walked up to the post office that I normally go to when I want to mail stuff, because they're nicer than the Ft. Dearborn post office (for real, you guys, don't ever go to the Ft. Dearborn post office, they're terrible people). But when I got to the Nice Post Office, I saw something a little odd through the window. The PO boxes had been gutted -- there were just big walls with gaps in them.

That's a little strange, I thought to myself jauntily. They must be remodeling! Oh well, I will mail my packages and make pleasant chit-chat about the remodeling and be on my way!

Then I got to the front door and there was a sign there all SUCKER WE MOVED WE'RE BACK THE WAY YOU CAME AND HIDDEN IN AN APARTMENT BUILDING NOW. Only, you know, in more formal wording and with a giant google map printout.

THEY MOVED THE POST OFFICE.

Who does that? I've never seen a post office move before. Where once there is a post office, there is now no post office! Just a big googlemap making me look like a dumbass! What is this, a Miyazaki film? POST OFFICES ARE SUPPOSED TO STAY PUT.

Clearly I need a "sam doesn't handle change well" tag.