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Good morning, and welcome to Radio Free Monday! Nice short one this week, I think everyone's feeling the holiday burnout a little.

Ways To Give:

wordweaverlynn linked me to two friends of hers who are trying to get back rent paid off and cover moving expenses. They're offering DJ services and custom mix CDs in return for donations. You can check out their price list and make a purchase here. I've never seen DJ services set up quite this way before, it's pretty awesome.

wanderingwidget has a post up about her friend Blade, the Artistic Biker, who needs help opening and operating an art studio intended to make art accessible and show his work. He has an amazing number of projects going, and you can read more about them and how you can help here.

keenquing is starting up a fandom auction in support of The Jim Collins Foundation, with listings opening on the 16th. The auction is looking for sellers and anyone who would like to help out with admin. The Jim Collins foundation provides financial assistance to transgender people for gender-confirming surgery. You can find more information and join the community here.

News To Know:

There was a news story in December about a woman who won her Navy vessel's lottery to be the recipient of the "first homecoming kiss" when they docked, and how for the first time in the Navy, her partner waiting for her on the dock was a woman. The photo is lovely, and I think it speaks volumes about the actual people in our military that Gaeta is pretty sure her shipmates bought tickets for her as well.

Momentary soapbox: I linked my mum to this story, because I thought it was a nice story and even though Mum has some hard-to-break beliefs and assumptions about homosexuality, I've been working on those. I think it's important to put in front of her the fact that movie stars she likes, people she admires, my friends, and people she sees every day are sometimes gay, and that their sexual orientation isn't actually something she needs to give a damn about.

Instead of saying "Why do they have to do that in public?" like she might have a few years ago, she said, "That's so sweet! Wow, they're young," like it wasn't no thing. The point of which, I guess, is that progress is rarely as firm or fast as we'd like, but even on an individual level it can happen. We might not think what we say to other people matters, but it has a long-term effect.

Via Nicole, I was linked to a blog post about Target's use of a child with Down syndrome in one of their clothing ads, and how it's a vital demonstration of companies Doing Inclusive Right.

Just For Fun:

onebrightroad linked me to Packing Tape Art. OMG COOL.

elisi linked me to the Top 25 Autocorrects Of The Year.

WILDEBEEST TAKES OUT BICYCLIST, FILM AT 11. Okay, it's actually an antelope, but close enough.

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. 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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Every year in Switzerland the World Economic Forum holds a conference which brings together some of the richest and most powerful people in the world to discuss the pressing issues of our day and, one assumes, swill unbelievable amounts of extraordinarily expensive booze while comparing how rich they are. We in the research biz call it "Davos" because that's the town where it's held, and Davos is easier to say than The World Economic Forum Conference.

Our job, each year, is to cross-reference the list of Davos attendees with our database and provide the resulting list to fundraisers, who throw a reception at the conference. On the side, we research attendees that our fundraisers are interested in, and provide profiles of them. I actually just got asked to do a research file, which isn't part of my job but is super-fun, and now I know more about certain Indian media groups than I ever thought I would.

I enjoy reading and researching the list because of the awesome names I occasionally stumble across, like Alpha Conde (currently president of Guinea), Romulo Roux (Minister for Canal Affairs in Panama), and Yana Peel (founder of Intelligence Squared Asia). I'm pretty sure Romulo Roux is some kind of supervillain.

Far and away my favourite, however, is Nicholas Stern, Baron Stern of Brentford. He's ecologically-minded, stylish, obscenely rich, and his name is Baron Stern.

One of my colleagues told me that a few days before the conference convenes, a horde of beautiful women show up in Davos and start hanging out in hotel bars, looking to snare a sugar daddy. Which is what I call entrepreneurship, but it conjures the most wonderful mental image ever.

I keep picturing Davos as a festival of sleazy billionaires holding orgies with beautiful gold-diggers and Baron Stern throwing massive feasts, all set in some kind of opulent ski chalet with yodelers in the distance, while Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark get into a fistfight over the caviar.