SEVEN DAYS, SEVEN POSTS...YOU'S SO LUCKY...

Yep, I deserve it so I'll just come out and say it.

"I done falled off."

But I'm back like cooked crack and, to prove it, I'm committing to seven posts in seven days. My last post was how I'm giving up Taco Bell (which I am), but I have a level of quality that must be maintained at The Root Down and, simply, you deserve better than that. I guarantee that this week will be one not soon forgotten. We're gonna done get this train back on the figurative track and make things right again. Yes, we'll talk about baseball. We'll talk about monkeys. We'll talk about hip hop. Maybe we'll even talk restroom behavior again. At the end of it, I'll unveil the new design for you folks at www.cafepress.com/therootdown so you can go cop those tasty threads. Yep, it's a big week and you should consider yourself lucky you tuned in.

Chris Hansen's doing a new show. Maybe a good thing. He's calling it "To Catch an I.D. Thief." Okay, really it's the same show, but like my lovely wife says, "He's just trying to make the world safer to live in." Keep rockin' it, Chris. But the sexual predator shows are much iller.

I think I'm finally coming around to the notion of hip hop being "dead." I'm calling it a "suicide." Only because, on a long ride home from the Getdown this weekend, I listened to a gonzo De La Soul playlist that spans their entire career including remixes, B-sides, cameos and even about an hour of Prince Paul work for good measure. They don't make 'em like they used to. Actually, I say "suicide" when it might have been "homocide" by license holders and greedy lawyers that insist on clearance and payment for every fragment of a song. Because such limitations where put on what could be used and what can't, labels and rappers alike got gun-shy and began to do everything with drum machines and live instrumentation. Since this evolution, only a very few have pulled it off with any tastiness. Pharrell, Timbaland, El-P come to mind. That's three producers out of what a bed of manure that was, at one time, considered the very future of music. Just a bunch of crap out there. It's getting harder and harder to pick 20 albums to honor at the end of the year. Seriously. I don't want to cause unnecessary alarm, but I hear about 150 hip hop albums during the year and only maybe five to ten are worth the listen. And, on top of that, only about three to five are actually worth the purchase. We gotta take it back to 1987. Turn the clock back twenty years. Trust me on this one.

Awesome that I went to Half Priced Books in the Getdown this weekend and bought Al Kooper and Shuggie Otis on vinyl, got home and found out it was warped like a muddah on the edges. Yeah, so freaking awesome. Gotta love that Tejas heat.

Jon Lester, the man who defeated cancer to ultimately return to the rotation, takes the mound against the Indians tomorrow. Now, I ain't about to say this is all wrapped up (Dolan) and the AL East is a done deal, but you gotta love a rotation that includes Curt Schilling (rehabbing), Josh Beckett, Tim Wakefield (still effective except for against the Spanks), Matsuzaka, Lester (7-2 in his brief 2006 campaign), Okajima, Kason Gabbard (who has only allowed six hits and two walks in the last 16 innings), Paplebon and Madman Julian Tavarez. I mean, that's a cannon you just don't wanna mess with. Any dude that beats cancer is battle-ready, in my book.

Planning our trip to the Promise Land (Fenway, um, Boston--since, "It's not all about baseball," I tell my lovely wife.) which is racing up on us. End of August to be somewhat precise. Yeah, it's not all about baseball because I have the Samuel Adams Brewery just about three quarters of a mile away. I gotta say, if it ain't all about baseball on September 1st in Boston, I'm not sure what it is all about.

Man, the local news sucks horribly. It sucks so bad that I'm near accusing them of keeping the citizens of the Yellow in the dark. I mean, it's no surprise that the Yellow's level of global-awareness is close to that of a retarded man. If we haven't smoked ourselves stupid with historical amounts of methamphetamines (not myself, mind you) or sunburned off the remaining brain cells left after the fry we receive from watching the local weathermen (comedians), we have three television stations that deliberately filter out all the important news and, instead, feed us crap stories like some local cook that made it on a reality show, a head that was found in a dumpster without a body (okay, that one was a little entertaining) and the steady 93-degree forecast that no one really cares about. Weren't we in a war? Aren't candidates getting ready for a heated run for the presidency? There's devastating fires that are scorching acres-a-second in the mountain states and, yet, the Yellow news stations seem to believe that a pothole and a twelve-mile-an-hour breeze from the southwest is phenomenally more important than anything going on outside the city limits. People gotta step yo game up.

This is my brother. He's a righteous fella.

Tonight's Sunday night. Tomorrow, you'll have another post waiting for you. You ain't even ready for the monkey story. Holla.