Meet Gunner. He’s a 2 year old German Shepard and Poodle Mix who lives in North Carolina.

If you happen to see this thing on the street; RUN! He’s got the herpes!

Why in the world am I telling you this?

Good question. Last night, I was doing my best to focus on Game 6 of the Bulls vs. Celtics series, which has been a classic series in NBA Playoff history. Unfortunately, I had to be on a conference call for most of the second half of the game and was only able to sneak an occasional peak at the score of the game. Luckily, or so I thought, Gunner’s owner was chilling on my couch and keeping me updated on the important developments in the game.

Once I concluded the call, the aforementioned owner had already fired up the PS3 and wanted to challenge me to a game of NBA 2K9.

“What happened with the Bulls/Celtics game?” I asked. “Oh, the Celtics won.” he replied. I said to him “That’s a damn shame. I really wanted to see that series go seven games.”

I proceeded to embarrass this guy by handing him four consecutive losses before he finally called it quits for the night.

The Playoff game became an afterthought, that is until about 5am this morning, while I was waiting for a video project to finish rendering and I turned on Sportscenter. They must have talked about this spectacular three overtime thriller, which the BULLS won, for at least forty minutes of the sixty minute program. I believe there were seven plays from this game included in their countdown of the top ten plays of the day.

I couldn’t believe this dude had made the hasty decision of deciding the game was over, knowing that all of the prior games in this series had come down to the wire.

So as retribution for this careless error, I’m going to spare him the personal embarrassment he deserves for this bad judgment, but can’t let it go unpunished. I’m now informing the public that his dog is infected with the herpes virus. I found this out by glancing at a vet bill that he left laying around, which specifically itemized Herpes Treatment for Gunner as the reason for the invoice.

Hopefully, a valuable lesson will be learned here. If you lie to me about the score of a basketball game; I’m going to tell everyone your dog has herpes. Seems fair to me.

Jon Stewart could teach a few rappers how this beef stuff is supposed to be done. This was ugly…

I’m sitting at the airport with time to kill and decided to hunt down some new music since I’ve grown tired of about 90% of the tracks on my iPod. Seems like a simple task; right? There’s about 250 million hip-hop blogs out there (although many are just carbon copies of larger sites), so most would assume this would offer a plethora of new tunes to check out. Wrong.

These days the music is playing second fiddle to the soap opera we’ve allowed this culture to become. To find something new right now you’ve got to dig through 500 posts about 50 Cent vs. Rick Ross, Chris Brown vs. Rihanna or random videos of Cam’ron pretending he’s still relevant while attempting to beef with anyone that will listen. You could reincarnate Biggie and Pac and get them to cut a new track, but if 50 Cent makes a cartoon about Rick Ross that day you can bet everyone will be talking about that new 50 Cent cartoon.

How did we get here?

At one point in time, it was mildly entertaining to see 50 Cent instigating beefs, but at one point in time it was entertaining to hear new music from 50 as well. The beefs aren’t fun anymore (see Why Does the Saigon vs. Joe Budden Battle Suck?). There’s no sincerity or real emotion involved, just drama for the sake of keeping your name out there.

Obviously, these beefs aren’t proving to increase record sales. Sure, they keep an artist’s name fresh in your mind, but for all the wrong reasons. If anything, these beefs hurt record sales and if you’re paying attention to what’s going on in the music industry you’ll understand that poor record sales aren’t helping anyone at this point.

Have these artists decided that music is no longer relevant and they’re better off trying their hand at being a net celebrity?

If that’s the case, bring some fucking creativity to the game. You and your homies sitting around mean-mugging a camera and making meaningless threats against your adversaries is played out. I would rather watch a Youtube clip of 50 Cent ordering a Whopper at Burger King. At least in that case I wouldn’t know exactly what was going to be on the video before I even hit the play button.

I’ve got no problem with rappers taking to the net with senseless videos (in moderation), but there also has to be a balance between the music and everything else because at the end of the day your job title is still musician.

I pray that this whole Youtube beef thing is just a fad that will pass quickly and hope some of the bloggers that continue propagating this stuff will get sick of it as well. If not, this culture will continue to sink so low that we’re going to lose the little bit of credibility we’ve got left.

Did we come this far to create a soap opera?

If you’re comfortable answering yes to that question, I dare you to turn on network television in the daytime and see what we’re striving to associate this culture with.

If you’ve been here before, you already know the soap opera that is the career of Charles Hamilton is pure entertainment to me. I won’t even drop my own commentary this time, this stuff speaks for itself.

1) Hamilton gets lyrically massacred by Serius Jones at his own show.

2) Hamilton’s label, Interscope, cleans house  letting go a number of employees, which was described by one source as “a blood bath.”

Odds of an actual album release by Hamilton reduced from Probably Not Gonna Happen to It Will Drop Right After Detox.

3) Rhymefest, a Grammy winning MC, takes offense to Hamilton’s use of his name on various occasions (including the Hamilton v. Serius battle) and begins venting his feelings publicly.

First a series of Twitter messages appeared where Rhymefest made it clear he was no fan of Hamilton.

Later in the week Rhymefest decided Twitter wasn’t the most effective way of sharing his thoughts and delivered Super-Sonic, a diss record aimed at Hamilton.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

4) Since it’s almost a certainty that Hamilton will try to cash in on this (negative) publicity (again) with a diss record of his own, we’ll go ahead and include that as a failure as well (unless he gets Serius Jones to write it for him…).