Could this be Manuscripts Burns's most popular month ever?

The answer is maybe...WITH YOUR HELP.  Take a look at this graph:

THAT, my friends, is how blogger tracks hits by month.  And this is your humble blogmeister's graph.  (Less numbers, because those would just be embarrassing for all parties involved.)

Now, I know what you're thinking.  Where's 2010?  Yes, it's true, an entire year of blog stats is simply missing.  As is, to be frank, January 2009-April of 2009.  So this can hardly be said to be comprehensive, as it's missing some sixteen months of data, for reasons known but to the internet gods.

However, based on what I DO know, June 2011 was the height of the blog's popularity with, oh, let's call, it, twelve billion hits.  (You'll recall that was the month I posted daily for the thirty day music challenge.  This second parenthetical sentence exists simply to provide you with the rest of the links.)

And for reasons again known but to HTTP:// the All-Merciful, December 2011 is shaping up to be ALMOST as popular.  We are just a few hits shy of matching June, with far fewer posts.  Now that says to me that more people are visiting the blog, rather than the same people just checking in each time there's a new post.

So here is my challenge to you: help us out.  Can you tell a friend to leaf through the archives?  (The Last War is just sitting there, waiting for someone to finally read it.)  Can you post a link to your humble purveyor of blogstrosities on your far more popular blog or website?  Can you tweet it or share it on MySpace?  Or, perhaps most valuable of all, can you set up one of those drinking birds to keep clicking refresh in your browser window all day and all night until New Year's?  I think you can.  And I thank you.

Remember, this "achievement" is as much yours as it is mine.  Mostly yours, really.  And also my drinking bird.

X-Mas X-word

First, you should check this out.  If you're like me, you'll insist on completing it Lonesome Dove-style before checking out some of the answers indicated in the comments below.  (Make sure you check out the errata before you do...I'm still upset about the NOIA Saints.)  But if you need some help (or just generally don't care) here's my solution.  (I make no claim that my solution is correct but...come on.)

MC Slippers - Gimme Some Money For X-Mas, Bitch!

I can only hope that this video does better than the Manuscripts Burns YouTube Channel's all-time lowest viewed video.  Special thanks to DJ Flav for use permission, and, of course, creating this brilliant piece of ephemera.

A Very Important Countdown...

Dear Everyone Who Thinks That Now That He is Dead You Can Call Christopher Hitchens "Hitch,"

If you didn't know him, you probably still can't.  You also probably shouldn't refer to Martin Scorsese as "Marty."

Lying Down With Dogs

I almost lost a Soldier because of a dog.

You might think from that first sentence that this is an epic story of war and triumph, like when Ripley had to go back for the cat in Aliens.  It's not.  It's actually a very dumb, verging on ridiculous story.  I don't know if that's going to prove my point better or make it seem sillier, but it's the only story of this type that I've got so I'm going to tell it.

Here's what happened: a group of Soldiers were living in a building on a Forward Operating Base (FOB.)  An Iraqi Army unit was living in the next building over.  The two buildings were fenced off from each other for security reasons, not least of all because we didn't trust the IA.  They're supposed to be our allies, but you can never tell whether they've been corrupted by insurgents or not.  (This was all some years ago, so I apologize if the situation is changed.  In fact, I'm sure the IA is much more trustworthy now than they were then.)

There was a dog running around the FOB.  As anyone who's been to The Middle East knows, Arabs hate dogs with the same intensity that they hate pigs.  (For some reason everyone knows about the proscription on pigs, but no one seems to know about the one on dogs.  Perhaps because we don't routinely eat dog?)  Dogs are anathema to Muslims.  So. naturally, the Iraqis on this FOB were trying to kill this particular dog. 

MY Soldiers then decided to "save" the dog by bringing her into the fenced compound.  Guess what?  The bitch was pregnant, and now there was a litter of puppies running around the American building in addition to the momma.  The Iraqis very much wanted to put the dogs down, but they were reluctant to fire on the American building, for obvious reasons.  So every day that went by the Iraqis got more and more furious, and the American Soldiers seemed to find it hilarious and enjoyed taunting the Iraqis.

This is all set-up.  Here's what happened.  One day the mother dog got out.  Seizing their opportunity, the Iraqis set upon the dog to kill her.  One of my Soldiers ran out of the compound after her.  As he got the dog and ran away, the IA, our allies, shot at my Soldier.  He got away due to good fortune or bad aim, and that was that.

So.  That's my story.  What's my point?  Well, the point is that there have been a lot of feel-good stories lately about "saving" the dogs that our service members adopt.  Every time I see one of these I get really angry, and I think most service members, the good ones anyway, do, too. 

Keeping pets is illegal.  It's a violation of General Order 1, the rule so important, it was the first one the Army's Central Command decided to write.  It also says that we can't drink or have pornography while deployed.  Yes, service members hate it.  Yes, service members break it all the time.  But it's not there for fun.  It's there to save lives.

I hated being sober and celibate during my deployment.  I would never do it stateside.  But I know why I had to do it.  I couldn't ever afford to be drunk, because I could've been mortared at any time.  I could've thought it was safe and had a little tipple of hooch, and all of a sudden we're getting RPGed and I need to have my wits about me and lead men.  And Soldiers fucking their superiors?  Let's not even get into what that does for morale.

Civilians, I gather, tend to understand these restraints, but for some reason the pet thing just doesn't strike home with them.  (Although, to be fair, I've also heard a civilian vociferously argue that our boys were getting drunk on beer every night and having a grand old time, "just like in Vietnam.")  Well, let me break it down for you.  Dogs in Iraq aren't like dogs in the United States.  They have rabies, for one thing.  For another thing, some of them aren't dogs at all, but are dog-like jackals.

If you disregard the health concern (?) keeping dogs is terrible for the American image in the Middle East.  It's not like everyone loves us over there to begin with, but there's a difference between being a good guest, being an uninvited guest, and being a jackass.  If you didn't invite someone to your house and they came anyway, you might be frustrated but if they showed good manners and made polite conversation you'd probably tolerate them and maybe even think better of them in the future.  Now imagine that same person came to your house, took off his shoes and walked around barefoot, then took a big stinky shit in your toilet and didn't flush.

This whole thing with the dogs is the big stinky upper-decker in our relations with Iraq.  See, the thing about the party guest in the metaphor is that he probably doesn't get that what he's doing is wrong.  He probably goes around barefoot and forgets to flush at home.  He doesn't mean anything by it.  But when you're in somebody else's house you're supposed to think about how THEY would like you to act.  Every time a service member adopts a dog they're spitting in the eyes of Islam and Iraqi culture.  I imagine it would be something like if an Iraqi set up a big burning cross in my front yard, and then acted like nothing had happened and tried to have a negotiation with me.

There's a cumulative effect.  No, one dog is not going to sour the whole Iraqi-American diplomatic relationship.  But I just read today that one woman has saved 223 dogs.  That's 223 burning crosses on Iraqi lawns.  That I'm certain of.  It's almost certainly a much higher number.

So, all right, let's say you don't care about the public health concerns, and you don't care about Arab-American relations.  Do you care about the lives of our American service members?  Because I almost lost a Soldier because of a dog.