In this, our final (for now) "rich people snubbing charities" post, a reader sends a letter about his own getting-ignored-by-Valley-people story. Over the past few years, Michael Birdsong asked VCs or tech company leaders, all employing him at the time, to match funds he was raising to fight cancer. Give ya two guesses whether they even responded.

Thanks to a Valleywag post from earlier today, one of sixteen tech superstars has replied to a message from Curt Hopkins.

Marketer and pro-blogger advocate Curt Hopkins is a good and reasonable man. Good because he's running the Blogswana project, in which students will help those affected by AIDS in Africa tell the world about their plight. Reasonable because when he asked the following Valley people — people known as good souls with a passion for world-changing technology — for financial support, he expected a few yeses and a few nos.

We received a tip this morning that the staff of Marie Claire was gathered in Times Square, clad only in bathing suits. A Hearst spokeswoman confirms this is true — the bathing beauties were doing a fundraiser for the Skin Cancer Foundation, she explained — but won't release any photos. (Apparently they want to save their pictures for their own magazine. Crazy!) This, then, is where we turn to you. Someone out there must have happened past and caught this with a cameraphone or something. A little help?

Slate's annual list of the 60 largest charitable contributions of 2005 is out: the late Cordelia Scaife May emerges as the biggest contributor, having left her $404 million estate to charity; Bill and Melinda Gates come in second with $320 million. But what about our favorite media moguls?

Today's lesson: On the Monday morning when charities have just beaten storms for Person of the Year honors and Time's cover, this is not a good headline for a story about traditional holiday-season charities facing shortfalls because people have given so much money this year to storm-recovery charities instead.

Time announced its Persons of the Year early yesterday morning, and the winners were Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates, "[f]or being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow." This is good news for things like philanthropy and poverty reduction and debt elimination, but it also very bad news for Mother Nature, previously thought to be the leading contender for this year's honor. It's also, perhaps, a harbinger of a very bad 2006: If the tsunami, the earthquakes, and Katrina weren't quite enough to put Nature over the top in 2005, we hate to think what she's now planning for next year.

Today is, as we hope you know, World AIDS Day, and it's as good a time as any to remember that, two decades into the pandemic, millions of people worldwide are still dying and there is still no cure. This year, AmFAR chairman and lefty shoe designer Kenneth Cole created the "We All Have AIDS" awareness campaign. While it has goals we share and a King Christian of Denmark sensibility we admire, we're entirely unconvinced that selling this particular t-shirt is necessarily the best way to raise money for the cause.

Thoughts on two consecutive nights of Broadway theater:

Notes an emailer from within 4 Times Square:

In front of 4 Times Square earlier today:

Ah, Craiglist, where charity and random sex meet. Posted today:

A reader searching for cheap but chic airfares somehow ended up reading about the latest in the rubber-bracelets-for-charity trend: the purple-and-green KARE bracelet for Katrina relief. While we have no reason to suspect said reader is opposed to Katrina relief — we're certainly not, before you send those angry emails — she is displeased with this charity drive.

Yes, yes. We know it's barely 11 in the morning. But we believe it's never too early to start making drinks plans, and, conveniently, the list of New York bars participating in Monday's Save New Orleans Cocktail Hour has been released.

This press release showed up sometime in the last, confusing day or two:

Ladies and Gays, start your libidos: The 2006 firefighters calendar goes on sale today, featuring 13 of New York's finest specimens. If the fire in your pants is completely intolerable, you can even go stalk the Calendar of Heroes' Beefy McBeefcakes in Times Square, where they'll be autographing your already-sticky copies from 11-3. All money raised by the calendar's sales go to the nonprofit FDNY Fire Safety Education Fund — which means, for once, your financial investment in spank material will go to a very good cause.