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Good morning everyone, and welcome to Radio Free Monday!

Ways To Give:

ginmar linked to adelheide, who is facing employment issues and trying to pay her rent on a temp salary. She is selling handmade jewelry to make up the shortfall; you can check it out, buy some, and support a fellow fan-in-need here.

thelinesoflearning has just lost their job and is selling Tarot readings and Tarot-based stories to earn extra cash. A one-card draw and a short sample of the story is free, and then you can pay for a full reading or more of the story as you desire.

Anon has a post up asking for help raising funds for some fairly necessary and urgent dental work. The post linked to here is an anonymized account, but they have contact information there for anyone who wants to help.

iamshadow linked to a fundraiser for Todd Ramsbottom, who is about to undergo a bone marrow transplant for his leukemia. The transplant is covered, so the fundraiser is to help pay for things like loss of wages, transportation to and from the hospital, and other costs associated with his recovery.

mad_maudlin linked to the KPC Buddhist Temple in Montgomery County, MD, which has been closed because of a zoning issue; they need to do more than a million dollars worth of renovations to every part of the building to meet the building code. This page has more details and a Donate link to help out.

Tailor linked to the Kickstarter fundraiser for the Fight Like A Girl short story anthology, which is being started up by a group of fandom folk. The book will be about strong female characters, and they're just a little over halfway to their goal.

The Public Domain Review is an awesome website full of not only interesting public domain material but scholarly work that concerns it, and they are fundraising to continue their mission now that their initial funding is coming to an end. You can watch a neat video and support the PDR here!

News to Know:

Archane linked me to some posts in John Scalzi's blog, via Writers Beware, about poor contract terms being offered by Random House's new direct-to-ebook genre imprints. They seem to be especially interested in work by fandom writers: "If anyone's shopping around fic-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off, (a la 50 shades), this isn't exposure and it isn't the new reality of publishing, it's exploitation". There's a link to a contract by one of the branches here.

yamx reminded me that Kiva is offering free trial loans again. Kiva is a microfinancing company that allows you to lend money, in $25 increments, to people all over the globe who don't qualify for traditional bankloans. If you sign up as a new user now, you can make a $25 loan to a borrower of your choice at no cost to yourself.

Jobs!:

mamculuna linked to some local job openings: two full-time tenure-track faculty positions at a community college in Columbia, SC. She encourages people to become familiar with two key documents (Characteristics of a Highly Effective Two-Year College English Instructor and Guidelines for the Academic Preparation of English Faculty at Two-Year Colleges) available here. Application deadline is April 5.

Anon passed on a link to the Windy City Gazette, which is looking for volunteer bloggers from the Chicago/NW Indiana area to write about pretty much everything. Contact info is on the site or can email dcarpenter@windycitygazette.com if interested.

Just For Fun:

Jenny let me know that Tuesday is the 100th anniversary of Canberra, and Canberrites are asking all Australians to toast the city at 11:15am. When the city was founded people were asked to "raise a toast to Canberra" and so they're doing it again 100 years later.

The Tribune Tower in Chicago, which I walk past to get to work most days, has several stones and other decorative elements embedded in its walls from monumental sites around the world: forts, temples, churches, houses of government, ancient ruins, and battlefields. One of the latest to be added is a twist of girder pulled from the rubble of the Twin Towers post-9/11. Here is a photographic compilation of all 149 of them.

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 (or ask for help!).

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Last night I was about to make brownies when I got an email from a friend with a photo from their field trip to a maple syrup farm. And I thought yes. Maple syrup brownies.

So I made your standard "sugar, eggs, chocolate, other stuff" brownies, nothing out of the ordinary, but I substituted maple syrup for a quarter of the sugar involved. I figured that wasn't so much liquid it would change the content of the brownies, but wasn't so little syrup that the taste would get lost in the chocolate. Because maple syrup, goddammit.

The brownies came out fine, but between sampling one last night and packing one in my lunch this morning I forgot that I'd used maple syrup. So I took a big bite of the brownie at lunch today and made A Face.

What the hell was that taste? It wasn't bad, just...not something often found in brownies. What did I put in these --

Ohhhh. Right.

Winning Monday, that's me!

But I do have maple brownies.

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I am doing my best to get some research profiles done this afternoon, but one of the guys I'm researching has a name that is apparently often used in email bank scams, and the other shares his name with a guy who stole like three million dollars from the Chinese government before fleeing to America.

SO MY SEARCH IS SOMEWHAT HAMPERED.

Also, I discovered at one point the North China University of Petroleum Employees changed its name to the Beijing Institute of Economic Management, which seems like something of a drastic shift in focus. I mean, it makes sense, but still.

Given the crazy tone of some of the articles I've read while researching Chinese businessmen, my afternoon has been a melange of communism, xenophobia, and bank fraud. It'd be cinematic if I hadn't spent it sitting at a computer.

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I got an actual facts scam letter in the mail today. Not even on email! In my mailbox!

I almost feel special, except for how someone who wants to steal my credit card number already has my name and address.

Check out their text:

"I am pleased to inform you that you have qualified for an award of 2 roundtrip airline tickets. Congratulations."

Can't you hear the enthusiasm? I know I can.

The scamsters, who apparently don't understand how margins work based on their letterhead, want me to call them. Presumably then they'll ask for my credit card information in order to "hold" the tickets for me; I know in general how these things work. Neal Caffrey would be so ashamed of them.

The generic "Vice President" has the awesome fake name of Juli Rue -- or, if Juli Rue does exist, they don't have US public records. Their website, bensonnelson.com -- which I don't recommend visiting in case you catch something nasty -- is protected by a whois guard, which baffles the limits of my tracking ability, or I'd look the owner up on Lexis and give them a phone call at home.

Sadly, they will probably net some fish with this. Send out a thousand of these, there's bound to be one or two people who are really excited about winning a free round-trip ticket to anywhere. Usually the people who can't afford them on their own, which is what makes this a particularly sleazy try.

Still. This AND a jury duty summons in one day? My cup runneth over.