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)?

Doree Shafrir at The New York Observer recently described, ruefully, the slacker boyfriend who totally got his act together — a little too late. “Maybe, I realized, I had seen him as someone who had potential but just needed a little tweaking,” she writes. “But it was sort of annoying that he managed to do all the tweaking after we’d broken up.”

Ah, the Butterfly Effect, as Shafrir calls it it: “One day he’s a pot-addled caterpillar barely hanging on to his barista job, begging off brunch because he’s only got $37 in his checking account, spending his nights ‘playing music’ (his band is going to start playing shows again really soon) and eating cheese fries, and then, six months after the breakup, he’s turned into a Monarch: lost 20 pounds, has a job as a graphic designer, his band is playing the Bowery Ballroom and he has a new girlfriend (tall, blond, wearing what appears to be the $282 Vanessa Bruno sweater you eyed longingly at Stuart & Wright) who, he casually mentions when you run into him at brunch, is the heiress to a paper clip fortune.”
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Kind of puts certain things in perspective, actually.

“I don’t know if you know about ‘The Valley,’ but a teenager getting knocked up is certainly not news for us,” said [Wasilla resident Caleb, 29]. “So I am not at all surprised. As for Levi Johnston, what is the big debate? Last I heard he was going to marry Bristol. Why wouldn’t he?”

The comedian Bill Maher has called Levi “America’s number-one political prisoner.” He’s begged the youth to remember he still has options. “This is the 21st century, at least in the blue states,” Mr. Maher said on TV the other night. “You don’t have to do this. You have options,” he said. “Just grab your skull bong, climb out the window and get on the highway.”

“What I’ve heard from family members is that it was a high-school sweetheart kind of a deal,” said [Josh Sieler, 26, born and raised in Wasilla] of Levi and Bristol. “In Alaska people tend to get together with somebody—and let me think of a way to say this—it doesn’t seem as frivolous as it does down in the states. There’s not as much of a guy-girl ratio; there’s not a whole lot of fish in the sea in Alaska. You know, I married my high-school sweetheart and we’ve been together 10 years.

“If anything, I think it’s going to make things easier,” he continued. “You know, having snow for nine months a year, winter nine months a year, I absolutely would go insane if I didn’t have a wife next to me, or a significant other. It’s nice to have a companion in Alaska. I wouldn’t say that he has to all of a sudden give up any aspirations or goals that he has in his life. As far as ‘getting out,’ you know, it’s hard to get out of Alaska. You figure we pay $500 to go to Seattle round trip.”

From this week’s New York Observer.