Hey readers, next Tuesday is the ninth annual Buck-a-Hit Day on this blog. I and my inner circle of gift-giving buddies are going to give $1 to charity for every visit to this blog next Tuesday, December 20. And this year, we'll do that up to $5,000.

Can we get 5,000 visitors here next Tuesday? It's going to be a bit of a stretch. Lately we've been bringing in more than 4,000 unique visits (as counted by SiteMeter) on an average Tuesday, but traffic slows down during December, and next Tuesday is cutting it kind of close to Christmas.

So here's what we need you to do: Please start asking folks you know to show up on this site next Tuesday. Just for being here, just for a single click on bojack.org, readers will shake out a dollar of somebody else's money for a worthy cause. That's all they have to do.

Once they get here, of course, we'll be trying to hit them up for donations to one of our six favored charities, but that's up to them.

Speaking of which, we're going to be bold and try to break our previous record of $10,115 in overall donations for the day -- this year, the top of our thermometer will be $10,250. So in addition to getting 5,000 folks to show up here, we're going to try to get them to give charity, through us, a total of $5,250.

It's ambitious. Money's too tight to mention right now. But we're counting on our readers to come through. Do we sell subscriptions to this blog? No. Do we torture readers with pop-up and pop-under ads? Never. Do we blast audio commercials at people? Of course not. Once a year, we ask a few bucks for charity. We're confident that readers will pitch in, as they always do, despite the tough times.

If we got 5,000 visitors and they each gave a dollar, with another guaranteed $250 thrown in from our family and friends, we'd be there.

Our six charities will be the same as last year:

- Sisters of the Road Cafe
- Children's Heart Foundation, Oregon Chapter
- Human Solutions
- Virginia Garcia Memorial Health Center
- Oregon Food Bank
- Ronald McDonald House Charities of Oregon and Washington

So anyway, please do be here a week from today. Think about throwing something in the hat. But most of all, please help get out the word. That's Tuesday, December 20. Thank you.