If you want to donate $$$ to the Red Cross for hurricane relief, here are some donation-matching foundations/businesses that caught my eye:

The Barry Manilow Fund is actually giving double of what people contribute -- the fund itself matches the donation, and then, according to the website, Barry himself is matching the donation. So $1 = $3 thanks to the dude who writes the songs that make the whole world sing.

Whole Foods is matching in-store contributions, up to $1 million.

Amoeba Music is matching donations made at their stores. (Hec, time to go shopping!)

Best Buy is matching in-store contributions up to $1 million.

Peet's Coffee will match up to $25,000; donations go to the Red Cross, and you can donate online.

Lowe's will match total in-store contributions up to $2 million.

Herself (whom some of you know) posted on livejournal that there is a particular need for plus sized clothing for the people in Texas. This is the information:

Apparently women of size who are refugees from the hurricane are wearing garbage bags because there is nothing else that fits them.

Plus size clothes can be sent to this address for distribution to these survivors:

Helping Hands for Texas
c/o Alamo Premier Mortgage Group
10223 281 Freeway, Suite 200
San Antonio 78216

As a follow-up to Herself's post about the need for plus-sized women's clothing, she posted this as well:

If you don't have any plus size clothes to send, you can order some and have them sent. I just went to lanebryantcatalog.com, for instance, and was able to send quite a bit, shopping from the clearance section and applying the 20% Labor Day discount on the site's splash page. roamans.com will also have a lot of inexpensive stuff. Just ask them to ship your picks to the address above. Larger sizes are probably better, as women size 24 and up find it most difficult to find anything to put on even when they're not victims of a catastrophe.

This link is to a LiveJournal post with a long list of places/ways you can donate books to the hurricane victims (hey, we're Buffistas -- books are what we do): [link]

From a friend at the East Bay (SF area) SPCA, [link] re: support for animal welfare related to Katrina:

The two groups doing the most, IMO, are the vet assn from LA and MS;

I am adding them to our website.

www.lvma.org [link] and www.msvet.org [link]

Browncoat Red Carpet Premiere Shindig

Some lovely people took the bull by the horns a few days ago and reserved the mezzanine at the Hard Rock at Universal CityWalk overlooking the red carpet on September 22 so fans can scream and cheer for the cast and crew while eating yummy snacks and getting shitfaced.

It's a private party, costs $60, and since they just threw it together yesterday, need to get another 70 or so registrations by Sunday to make it work.

Please carry this post all over the internets. The ladies who put this together at a moments notice are loverly humans, help them out!

The Cookbook Team has decided to extend the deadline for recipe submissions, due to all the craziness in the world the last few weeks. So, the deadline for submessions is now Monday, September 19th. This gives everyone two weekends to get stuff typed up and e-mailed to buffistascookbook at gmail dot com.

We've got tons of great stuff so far. I can't wait to see what is yet to come. We've even been testing some of the recipes. Fabulous, fabulous stuff.

So, if you haven't submitted or you still have things you'd like to submit, now's the time!

Bay Area people!

Tomorrow night (that's Wednesday, 14 September), Ayelet Waldman will be reading and signing and doing a Q&A at M is For Mystery in San Mateo. She's got a new book out, in her Mommy Track Mystery series.

Ayelet is a superb speaker, funny as hell, passionate, and the Mommy Track mysteries are a hoot. But even if she was reading the phone book, she'd be fun to listen to.

So come on down!