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.

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…).

About two or three years ago, had someone given me the opportunity to choose any two rappers to battle one another, it’s quite likely I would have picked Saigon and Joe Budden to exchange bars. Now that it’s actually happening, I’m glad I didn’t waste my picks.

These are two emcees who rank in the 99th percentile amongst their hip-hop peers in the creative writing category, but have struggled to find (or maintain) much commercial success in the hip-hop industry.

The pair have gone back and forth on four diss records recently, with little hope for resolution in sight.

As I understand the chain of events that brought about the situation, it went something like this:

1) Budden mentions Saigon in the context of a song.

2) Saigon interrupts Budden’s name check as a diss. Puts video on World Star Hip-Hop discussing various topics, one of which being his dislike for Mr.Budden.

3) Budden claims original song was misinterpreted by Saigon, proceeds to release a real diss track- leading to subsequent back and forth by both sides.

The reason this beef sucks because there’s no compelling back story. The catalyst behind this drama is hip-hop’s equivalent to a dirty look. It’s tough to believe there’s sincerity from either artist on any of the tracks they’re exchanging because we all know these two aren’t really pissed off at one another.

Today, hours after Saigon’s newest diss track became the star of every hip-hop blog, Budden released the video below- which is incredibly dull compared to many of Budden’s previous installments of JoeBuddenTV, but closes with a suggestion that fans should expect something to happen at an upcoming show. Ironically, Budden and the Slaughterhouse crew (Budden, Joell Ortiz, Royce the 5’9 and Crooked I) have a show tomorrow night at S.O.B’s in NYC.

And for those with short memories, don’t forget Saigon has a history with S.O.B’s as well.

Budden’s label, Amalgam Digital, has also arranged a live web stream of the show (all drama aside this should be worth watching for the talent) and it’s a safe bet that at least half the people in attendance will be bloggers who will provide a play by play of the evenings events.

Hopefully someone will do something stupid to really escalate this shit, making further installments much more interesting and surely delivering hip-hop another black eye.

And this folks is the most interesting thing that’s happening in hip-hop these days…

Watch the ladies of The View discuss what a twisted beeyotch Ann Coulter is…while she’s sitting at the table.

Skip to about 6 minutes in for the best action.

Also, peep the quote below I found to accompany this video portraying poor Mr.Coulter as the victim of the diabolical women of The View.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Ann Coulter appeared on ABC’s The View to talk about her new book “Guilty: Liberal ‘Victims’ and Their Assault on America”. Well, at least she tried to talk about her new book. The women of The View were pretty determined not to giver her any chance to respond to their questions or comments. As with any episode of The View – this clip is hard to watch. You’ve been warned.

The book cites plenty of research done over the past 30-40 years regarding the social and economic results of the 300% increase in illegitimate children since 1970. In the book, Coulter makes interesting points about the relationship of single motherhood to child poverty, child abuse, domestic violence and crime.

Also, Joy Behar is completely obsessed with Sarah Palin. She’s pathetic.

This was actually intriguing and insightful.

Props to Vlad and Joe for presenting their cases well.

I must have watched this set about 50,000 times in my life. Me and the other scratch nerds around Cleveland used to use this video as an instructional guide on how to compete in DJ battles. Memories…

Shout out to FWMJ for posting!

Young Cash ain’t messing around. Since a dis record has to be in auto-tune these days, Cash goes in on B.o.B. for dissing auto-tune on his recent record “AutoTune” by making his own auto-tune record in response, appropriately titled…”AutoTune”. Spotted on ThisisTpain.com…just kidding.