Via SFGate

Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl vehemently denies Courtney Love's accusations that he was trying to woo her and Kurt Cobain's 19-year-old daughter, Frances Cobain. Says Grohl:

Unfortunately Courtney is on another hateful twitter rant. These new accusations are upsetting, offensive and absolutely untrue.

Love, however, remains steadfast in her assertions. Ugly business.

C'mon, Pearl, everyone knows you don't drive.

H/T: Andrew Chapman!

I imagined we stapled each other’s tongues and then made out enthusiastically until someone burst into the room, making unintelligible sounds. As the person was obviously me, I hoped the sounds were screams, but I'm pretty sure they were Spice Girls lyrics.

CNN:

Kravitz: Every child deserves clean water

WaPo:

Ja Rule told the New York Daily News that being in prison is “amazing.”

...[T]he rapper, who is serving two concurrent sentences for gun possession and unpaid taxes, has made some new friends at the Mid-State Correctional Facility. Buddies, Ja Rule said, he wouldn’t have met on the “outside”: Alan Hevesi and Dennis Kozowski.

I was showing your article tonight to a few friends of mine who are much more into Hip Hop music than I. I agreed with the general sentiment of the article, and was saying something to the effect when I was cut off, by my friend who said that the word "bitch" and "ho" is not used just against women but against men too.

This caught me off guard, and I suggested that hip hop music does not use that term against men, and even if it did, it would likely be used in an off-hand manner, in jest among friends, not in the same manner as when said to a woman.

My pal (MIke) says that men are called "bitches" and "hos" a lot in hip hop music.

So this is where I am hoping you can help me here: Is there a theme of men being referred to as bitches or hos in hip hop? I can't find A SINGLE REFERENCE anywhere online.

But why, at the end of the day, do so many black male rappers in the mainstream use this language of hate with such gusto? It is because their own status in this society is so precarious. And why is it so precarious? Because of years, generations of systematic emaciation and disempowerment.

The strange thing is this: Mainstream hiphop was not always dominated by Jay-Z types, the big exploiters of black male precariousness. It was much more democratic in its composition. Recall Queen Latifah's "U.N.I.T.Y." ("Who you calling a bitch?") was a huge hit and a part of mainstream hiphop discourse. The death of this democracy began when Tupac and Biggie Smalls turned hiphop over to corporate interests, which essentially saw a huge white market for black males who exploited their precariousness. Recall that insightful scene at the end of The Cotton Club. What are the choices for a black male in this society? To dance or the underworld. Gangster rap makes one of the two.

With gangsta rap you had something of an autocatalytic process: Black males exploiting their exploitation for their exploiters and for those who are exploited like them (keeping it real). That has been rap since 1997. Furthermore, democratic hiphop went underground and cultivated (in both senses of that word) a predominately white audience. Whites got the best of hiphop and blacks were stuck with the worst. (It's important to point out that hiphop for blacks was beneficial when there were "Potholes in My Lawn" and "Gangsta Gangsta" in the hood—both tracks were released in 1988, both were in groundbreaking and commercially successful albums.)

So, at the end of the day, blacks lost everything of any value and are stuck with Jay-Z, who only now realizes misogyny might not be so cool. As for females, empowerment has been reduced to: "put a ring on it."

Now you know. You reap what you sow. Dr. Boyce Watkins tells it like it is:

After building a multi-million dollar empire on the back of female degradation, Jay-Z has decided to soften up after giving birth to a little girl. The births of millions of other precious little black girls apparently meant nothing to Jay-Z, as he’s never had a problem letting us know that he has “99 problems, but a b*tch ain’t one.” So, all the other children NOT named Blue Ivy Carter weren’t even in the top 100 on Jay-Z’s distorted, dysfunctional priority list – but now he’s suddenly found religion.

You can’t spend two decades referring to other men’s daughters as b*tches and hoes, and then somehow decide that your own daughter is going to be exempt from the game. You, my brother, have given nearly every inch of your creative productivity toward murdering your daughter’s self and public image before she was even born. In other words, you brought Blue Ivy Carter into a world where most of your biggest fans will look at her and refer to her not as daddy’s little princess, but instead as a big booty b*tch. In fact, they will even get paid for it.

Jay-Z trying to ban the word b*tch after giving birth to a girl is like a mass murderer asking other killers to be nice to his relatives. His music has helped to infect the world with the virus of misogyny, and now he wants to act like the Center for Disease Control. He’s like the homophobic pastor who leads anti-gay lynch mobs and later finds out that his own son is gay.

...with no state of mind, blind to the ways of mankind:

The couple were visiting their twin daughters in the neonatal intensive care unit at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan on Friday night, as they have done daily since the babies’ premature birth on Dec. 28. But when they tried to leave the sixth-floor unit to go home to Brooklyn at about 11 p.m., the new mother, Rozz Nash-Coulon, recalled, a burly security guard suddenly blocked their way.

The familiar area outside the neonatal unit had been transformed: partitions had been put up, the maternity ward windows were completely covered, and even the hospitals’ security cameras had been taped over with paper. Guards with Secret Service-style earpieces roamed the floor.

“We were told we could walk no further,” Ms. Nash-Coulon said Monday. And when she and her husband, Neil, demanded an explanation, she added, the guard claimed, unconvincingly, “ ‘Well, they’re handling hazardous materials,’ ” even as a large group of people screened from view were passing through the main hallway he had declared off-limits.

It was just the first of a series of indignities that they and several other noncelebrity maternity patients say they experienced over the weekend, as Lenox Hill Hospital went all-out to protect the privacy of Beyoncé Knowles and Jay-Z, whose daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, was born there on Saturday.

Wine, sure. Wine glasses, no.

What is nostalgie de la boue? This is "nostalgie de la boue." The meaning of this wonderful French expression:

"Nostalgie de la boue" means ascribing higher spiritual values to people and cultures considered "lower" than oneself, the romanticization of the faraway primitive which is also the equivalent of the lower class close to home.