2008 - %3, March

Buried in the New York Times' outing of "Kristen"—a.k.a Ashley Alexandra Dupré—a.k.a. Eliot Spitzer's boo—comes this strange line:

On [Dupré's MySpace] Web page was a recording of what she described as her latest track, "What We Want," an amateurish, hip-hop inflected rhythm and blues tune that asks, "Can you handle me, boy?" and used some dated slang, calling someone her "boo."

Now, to pick apart this less than charitable and, frankly, catty article would take quite a while. But for now, let's address the linguistic issue here. Opinion at MoJo tends toward "boo" being not only current, but timeless. Urban Dictionary traces the origins of "boo" all the way back to the adoption of the French "beau" at the time of Caribbean colonization. Fast forward a couple of centuries and Tupac deployed "boo" in "It Ain't Easy" off his 1995 Me Against the World album. A full decade later, the term was still in use, as Usher's "My Boo" (feat. Alicia Keys) won a Grammy for best R&B performance in 2005 (see below). The next year, Brooke Valentine sang "He can call me his boo / But he call me dope girl, cuz I got that oooh." So it's pretty clear "boo" is here to stay. But did anyone really trust the Times as an arbiter of slang?

—Justin Elliott

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If you can stomach one minute and thirty seconds of a tenant/landlord dispute over an elevator in New York City, you're in for a treat. Because this video ends with a hilarious 15 second on-air argument between a reporter and an anchor that is very personal. Poor Ollie. He's not the boss of anyone anymore.

http://view.break.com/467869 - Watch more free videos

Why is this a news story anyway? And did the landlord's representative throw in a fist pump at the end of the interview? (H/T The Plank)

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Just what the abortion doctor ordered.

We're finally edging toward the middle on abortion—an agreement that most people, pro- or anti-, want to see unwanted pregnancies decreased and abortions lessened. Weird political bedmates Sens. Ted Kennedy and Sam Brownback (yes, the creepy one) have co-sponsored a bill to create a national registry of those willing to adopt children identified as having severe genetics defects like Down syndrome.

Brilliant. Doomed, but brilliant.

Whenever I hear of zealots terrorizing women at abortion clinics, as they cynically implore these besieged women to let their children be adopted, my lip curls. I was equally offended watching women on TV, (and it was always women), vent their rage on Susan Smith for the murder of her children. Of course Smith shouldn't have killed her kids (duh), but I was so enraged by the spectacle of a nation claiming they'd have loved and raised them for her instead that I checked: Unsurprisingly, there's been no spike in adoptions, not even in Smith's home town. Nor has the general stigma against adoption abated, though many Planned Parenthood Clinics are newly under siege. Hell, this 'Christian' nation doesn't care enough to educate, feed, and offer medical care to our existing children, and we're supposed to be believe people are 'pro life'?

My prediction: This national registry will flop. Protesting outside of clinics is quite different from agreeing to raise a fundamentally disabled child, as birth parents are oh-so-blithely instructed to do on pain of hellfire.

[Read more]

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We've covered this pretty extensively, so we might as well give you denouement. Geraldine Ferraro just wrote a letter to Hillary Clinton resigning from her campaign. "I am stepping down from your finance committee so I can speak for myself and you can continue to speak for yourself about what is at stake in this campaign," Ferraro says to Clinton. "The Obama campaign is attacking me to hurt you. I won't let that happen."

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