"Drag bodies to the Murdaland"

New house is working out, I'm eating good and we got big speakers in the living room.

I bought Supreme Clientele because I'm review Fish Scale for the City Paper and I wanted to be more familiar with Ghostface's work. Fishscale is great but Supreme Clientele is like Holy Shit, I should've gotten this years ago. New T.I. is cool too with some real catchiness and tight flows, but right now I'm feeling the real densely lyrical East Coast shit. Feel the same way about the new Juvenile, but I really like the song on there that samples Otis Redding.

Keep on the lookout cause I might be throwing together a new mix in the next couple weeks seeing as how I have all these new CDs.

Well, the study I was supposed to be in didn't pan out. Kind of a bummer cause I was looking forward to having all that money. It's still all good though. I'm moving tomorrow to a real house. The Copycat building should've been fun to live in, but there was too much drama and not enough parties. There was only one in our place, just when I was moving in. Some MICA kid who apparently wasn't even drunk took it upon himself to light a box of clothes on fire in the basement and our landlord got mad at us. So there was a ban on parties. Not that it would've been that great anyway - there were actually high school girls at the party we did have, which is totally not cool. That was the thing, the copycat would've been my spot if I knew about it when I was in high school. Now when I meet 24 year old guys with hair hanging in their faces who drink every day and pour coffee for a living I wanna be like "dude, that sucks." Maybe I'm getting snobby or something.

The No Child Left Behind Act pisses me off so much. I work at a Special Ed school in a class where most of our kids don't even have functional speech. Instead of teaching them skills they're going to need to communicate and take care of themselves and manage they're emtions, we have to waste time every day trying to teach them grade level material that mystifies them and that they don't need anyway. The life cycle of a butterfly, what the fuck? Plus it amounts to a whole new mountain of paperwork for our teachers. Despite the republicans claiming to be the party of small government what they've done is just created a whole new level of beurocracy. In regular schools where the kids don't perform well, probably like most of the schools in Baltimore, apparently a lot of kids now are only taking math, reading and gym. What does that say? That having a high school diploma won't help you get a decent job anyway but to get it you have to just crunch numbers all day, and that's what education is. It's a sad fucking day. I just hope that the passage of this law isn't a watershed moment in the history of education in America and that this law ends up being repealed before all the drama and music teachers get jobs at Starbucks and move to the copycat building.

For the next two weekends I'm gonna be a participant in a scientific study where they mesure the effects of coffee. I gotta go in for two whole weekends and drink 2 cups of coffee, and they're gonna pay me a $1000. I can't drink any alcohol or even coffee for the next couple weeks and I'm gonna be sitting around in some office doing nothing for the next couple weekends. But fuck a club, dog, I'd rather count a thousand bucks.

Diarheaastan. I hope they have HBO at this place. Oh and plus my NCAA brackets are all fucked up, I had Illinois going all the way to the final.

Pontiak opens up for Palomar at the Talking Head tomorrow night. Come party.

My sister is a Junior in High School and they're making her memorize the periodic table. What a monumental waste of time. I can't believe it.

Hank Williams III has an album out called Straight To Hell. I heard it playing at some music store and it sounded all right so I bought it, but by the time I made it out of the store I was already getting a little tired of it. Dude sings with the same throaty high-pitched voice as his granddaddy and it has a really old timey feel to it. There are instruments on this album that I've never even heard of, like "Clawhammer [could be a good Metal band name] Banjo" and "Upright Pedal" as well as all the mandolins and fiddles you'd expect from some nostalgic country or bluegrass. Hank III sings about country music having lost its soul from the point of view of like a prince-in-exile, and takes it upon himself to represent for a world that CMT is obliviouls to where people pop pills and cuss.

All of this sounds great on paper, but it has none of the warmth and accessability that made Hank Williams Sr. great. There's a song called Country Heroes where he sings "I'm drinking whiskey from a glass/ and if that ain't country/ then boys you can kiss my ass." The chorus gives shout outs to guys like Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard, and the whole album is dedicated to covering the same topics as guys like this. What Hank III doesn't get is that the best of these down and out, singing from the bottom of a bottle singers was that they sang about trying not to be like that. He's singing about being proud to be singing about the same shit that underground conscious rappers are proud to rapping about not rapping about and it fails for the same reason, having a skewed frame of reference and only being relevant in relation to what it hates.

Saw the Clipse up in NY this weekend. It was really short and totally to the point, them just doing all their best songs and leaving after about half an hour. Great show

Moving to the Patterson Park area this month, so watch out. I'll be living halfway between the ghetto and the Outback Steakhouse.

Some day I'm going to own a computer and I won't just be writing blurbs on this while I'm on break at work.

Check the City Paper for my write up of the Grand Buffet show.

Today's my last day of being 23 so I'm trying to make it count as I sit here in a library posting on a blog. Tomorrow night Dizzie Issie's - come out and get me wasted.

The Carter II is the best CD to wake up to that I own. I wake up to that shit and I'm invigorated all day, it's better than a cup of coffee.