From the New York Observer:

“Last week, I got dumped on the Lower East Side,” [Nate Westheimer] told The Observer. Mr. Westheimer, the 26-year-old head organizer of the NY Tech Meetup, had just ended his term as an entrepreneur in residence at Rose Tech Ventures. He fiddled with his iPhone, and said he wanted to create a mobile application designed for wallowing—one that could queue up classic New York–based breakup scenes from movies like Annie Hall and Kramer vs. Kramer. “I was like, I really want to see all the scenes about heartbreak that happen on like the Lower East Side,” he said.

And yes, they just may have an app for that.

Mr. Westheimer was explaining to The Observer why he had decided to return to the start-up game as vice president of product at AnyClip, an Israeli-based tech company that is planning to battle YouTube and other piracy sites in the free-media market by creating a competitive, legal database of movie clips for application developers. Only this one might cost ’em: AnyClip is hoping they can become a kind of iTunes for film scenes.

OK! So, just to plan ahead, what clips would you look up — and play over and over and over and over again — to tell the story of your breakup (only with people who look fabulous even when they’re miserable)?

Via Tango: 21 Twitter pickup lines, including the less than coy “Wanna go back to my house and #?” Just a punny diversion, I guess, given the less-than-intimate design flaw: @ kerfuffle notwithstanding, um, everyone can, of course, see your direct messages. Yo, geeks: is there a future for some sort of workaround app called Flirtr?

Anyone busy trying to “defend” marriage from the gays should be required to look Janice Langbehn in the eye.

SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you are not totally caught up with Dollhouse, or you will have to have a treatment. (Not counting the elusive — but coming! — episode 13.)

Perhaps my all-time favorite EVER feature on BG.net, almost TEN years ago, long before the advent of the KutcherTweet, was: Glam-Quest 2000. Teams in NY and LA fanned out to report celebrity sightings, which in turn were judged and tallied — as fickly as fame itself — by our own Gregoire.

And now this, from our own Amy in SF (former NY captain), which merits at least a Conversation Multiplier x Humor Bonus x BG Imaginary Boyfriend Gambit. In other words, Amy WINS.

i was at a restaurant and I saw him come in — but I couldn’t quite believe it because I NEVER see celebs in this burg — i asked the hostess “is that alan tudyk?” and she said “that is the name on his reservation, but who is he? why is everyone asking me that?” and so I marched up to his table with my wee daughter and said “i don’t usually do this” and he said, “you’re giving me your BABY?”

he was with a willowy blonde — and I started babbling about the last 2 episodes of Dollhouse, how I knew he was funny and great but his *physical* work was so precise and amazing, I said he must have studied mime or clowning or dance b/c it was really really good [well, he did go to Pirate Camp! — BG], and I wasn’t even a major Whedon-fan but I was so impressed yadda yadda, and he was just all “thank you! thank you so much!” very charmingly and talking to Penelope who was giving him big blue-eyed smiles, and he said the character of Alpha was just really fun to play, and I said we were all pulling for a 2nd season and good luck, and then I wet my pants.

We assume Amy will have another kid to replace that one.

Really? They need to try this hard to market chocolate to women?

(Somewhere, Miss Fling is snickering.)

On NPR.org, from FOBG Nancy Goldstein (married to super-cool cartoonist):

The cost of love isn’t an abstract concept in my household: It’s precisely $1,820 per year. That’s the “gay tax” we shell out for me to be on my wife’s health insurance plan, because her company must treat that benefit as additional taxable income.

The media’s primary focus on the morality debate around same-sex marriage means that most of the public, gay or straight, knows little about the very real economic costs of inequality. It doesn’t matter that Joan and I married in Massachusetts five years ago this week, or that our home state recognizes our marriage. It makes no difference that she works for a progressive company with an active LGBT employees group. Companies pay for their employees’ health insurance with pretax money through a federal program, and same-sex marriage isn’t federally recognized.

Read the rest here.

Seems the memes are changing on cheating. As writer Wendy Atterberry points out in a recent post on The Frisky, the simultaneous media blitzes for Elizabeth Edwards’ book and Kate Gosselin’s TV show have thrown infidelity into the spotlight — but for perhaps the first time, harsh glares are being cast on the cheated-upon women as much as the philandering men.

The question being asked: not “Why did she stay?” (and “How can she get through that press conference with that poker face?”) but rather (in the case of Edwards) “Why did I like her UNTIL she went on Oprah?” and, in general, “What did she DO to deserve that?”

Zoink! “If we’re going to point fingers at men behaving badly, we have to take a look at the women’s behavior that may provoke it,” Atterberry writes. Provoke?! She is not even talking about Rihanna. “Most issues — especially those within a relationship — are rarely ever black and white with a clear-cut victim and oppressor. People cheat for a variety of reasons, very few of which are strictly because they’re horrible human beings.”

OK, but you know what? People also cheat in relationships with delightful spouses. And people’s wedding vows to be faithful didn’t come with an asterisk. (*”Unless you’re a beeyotch.”)

We’re not saying women, including but not limited to Kate Gosselin, are always above reproach. But saying — in the name of some sort of new “equality,” as Atterberry does — that they somehow asked to be treated poorly…huh, where have I heard that? That they asked to be beaten? Asked to be raped? This is not enlightened. The only thing lamer than cheating is suggesting that someone drove you to it. Neither spouse, no matter how hellish to live with, should be blamed for the full and adult (or juvenile, depending) choices made by the other.

Now I’m going to go watch Jon & Kate and pretend none of this ever happened.

You guys have thoughts?

Justifiable matrimony from February 9, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

My girlfriend and I are both interested in marriage and children, and find each other sufficiently attractive that we’re willing to consider pursuing those goals jointly. We’re both approaching 40. I’m very shy, so I’ve had only three serious relationships before. She is about equally shy, but has had a little more experience, because as a woman she hasn’t been required to take the first move in relationships.

The thing that worries me is that we share almost no common interests other than our common interest in making a family. Can such a relationship work? Are we just getting desperate, and trying to make a relationship work that really can’t?

— James

  (more…)

A playa-dater from February 9, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

My problem is that it always seems that the guys who want to get involved with me are the ones who have girlfriends waiting at home for them. One guy in particular introduced me to his girlfriend without my even having a clue that he had one. I’m really afraid of repeating the same mistake. Do you know of any signs or signals that I can look for to ensure that this will not continue to happen?

— Completely Misunderstood
Dear Misunderstood,

Use the word “scrunchie” in a sentence. If he understands you, he’s got a Betty back at home. (Alternate test word: “loofah.”)

Love,
Breakup Girl

Do atheists have better sex? Over at the Blowfish Blog (via Alternet), materialist girl Greta Christina says yes, yes, yes.

To me, the idea that, out of nothing but earth and water and sunlight, these wildly complex living beings have developed, not only with the capacity for consciousness but with the capacity to create the experience of ecstasy for ourselves and one another…that is just jaw-droppingly astonishing. We can create the experience of joy, of deep, expansive pleasure that takes us out of ourselves and into one another…and we do it through a complex re-arrangement of the energy of the sun, and the atoms and molecules of the planet.

That is magnificent. That, more than any spiritual belief I ever had, makes me feel both humble and proud. That makes me feel intimately connected with the rest of the Universe…in a way that no spiritual practice ever did. What’s that old hippie song about how we’re stardust, made of billion- year- old carbon? You don’t have to believe in metaphysical energy to think that that is wicked cool.

There’s something else, too. When you look at human beings from a materialist and evolutionary standpoint, not as special spiritual entities or children of the Goddess but simply as another twig on the evolutionary tree…that view puts sex squarely front and center in the human experience. Sex has an immensely important place in the evolutionary scheme. Darwin wrote an entire book about it.

Why does sex feel so good? Sex feels so good because it evolved to feel good. Sex feels profoundly, transcendently amazing because evolutionary forces strongly favor animals who really, really like to boff. That’s an oversimplification — for one thing, evolution can also favor animals who are picky about their sex partners — but it is a huge part of the picture./snip/

In other words: According to a materialist viewpoint, the capacity for transcendent sexual joy is hard- wired into our brains…and it’s deeply and powerfully hard- wired, as a crucial and central feature of our lives, by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. /snip/

[This] means that the act of sex, and the experience of sexual pleasure, connects us to every other living thing on earth. We are the cousins of everything that lives on this planet, with a common ancestor of primordial soup going back billions of years…and we are all related, not entirely but substantially, because of sex.

That is awesome. That makes me want to go f*ck right now, just so I can feel connected with my fish and tetrapod and primate ancestors. That is entirely made of win.

Now, I would argue that the experience of Extreme Connectedness she describes is a spiritual experience. But why get all is-too-is-not over such a plainly lovely, and passionate, piece of writing? Primordial soup never sounded so hot.