BG’s pretend boyfriend Nick Andropolis Jason Segel speaks to NPR about real-life geekdom, bromance, respecting your ex, and the real-life Naked Breakup.

According to  Tony Dovolani, a pro on ABC’s Dancing With The Stars, dancing can improve your relationship, and not just with Bruno Tonioli. In fact, Dovolani spends time between seasons helping couples cha-cha, waltz, and salsa their groove back.

“It’s almost like you have a newfound love for each other,” Dovolani told Tango. “Discovering new steps together teaches couples to interact with each other. They’re looking into each other’s eyes, anticipating the next move. It opens up energy channels of feeling and connection. It rejuvenates everything.”

Can Dovolani even teach the broken-hearted to boogie back? ‘Cause we’re rooting for Rycroft in more ways than one.

(Puzzled by the subject line? Click here. It’s a classic.)

Speaking of Carrie and Randy, I told you so.

From today’s New York Times:

Moreover, teenage girls can’t be expected to support Rihanna just because of her gender, youth culture experts say. They see themselves as sharing equal responsibility with boys. Parity, not sisterhood, is the name of the game.

During a presentation about dating violence [!!!] to ninth graders at Hostos-Lincoln Academy this week, one girl said, “If they hit you, smack them back. Both my parents say that to me.”

When Danielle Shores, 17, a high school junior in Austin, Tex., heard about the fight, she thought: “Yeah, men hit women, and women hit men. It was blown out of proportion because they’re celebrities.”

She sounded miffed. “My best friend got hit by her boyfriend, and I don’t see people making a big deal about it,” Ms. Shores said.

Good: girls see themselves and their peers as strong, expected to take care of themselves. Sad: that means hitting back — and shrugging it away* — rather than telling anyone who hits them to step the eff off.

What, if not this, is it gonna take? For the moment, I have no answers.

* At least outwardly. Wonder how many are trembling, or at least conflicted, inside.

Alexis?!?! NOOOOOOOOOOO!

Therapy: Watch Carrie and Randy over and over and over.

P.S. The “fix” is out.

Another day, another survey showing many teens blame Rihanna for this mess.

From the Boston Herald:

“Experts say teens may be inclined to be sympathetic to Brown because of his popularity and the ‘normalization of violence’ in pop culture. ‘(Chris Brown) is or had been promoted as the kid next door, he was familiar and likeable,’ said [Deborah] Collins-Gousby, who works for Casa Myrna-Vazquez, a Boston-based anti-violence organization that operates a 24-hour teen violence hotline and a citywide outreach program. ‘Among teens, I think their first reaction was, well, what did she do to deserve a beating that significant?'”

The right question to ask, of course, is, “Who says anyone ‘deserves’ a beating?” The attitude captured in these surveys speaks to a disturbing misunderstanding of and desensitization to violence, “dating” and otherwise. That said, I also think there’s some interesting, if misguided, feminism at work underneath: the sense that today’s young women are now too strong to be mere “victims.” It’s utterly wrong-headed in this context, yes, and the “silver lining,” such as it is, is tarnished  by the incident that brought it all up. But: no one in this conversation is about to call women “the weaker sex.” And that, in its own twisted way, is progress.

Listen to Oprah! Tyra too! (And BG!)

Now it can be told (and Star is wasting no time, or compassion):

Brevi (Levstol?) was probably done long before the GOP was done with them.

Man, I still feel for those kids.

… is the wrong question to ask about Rihanna.

Here’s Meghan on dating while McCain:

One extreme fan of my mother’s recently told me I could be “his Cindy.” And then asked me if I ever wore pearls because they probably would look as good on me as they do on my mother. No, I’m not kidding. Any guy that has a fetish for older women in pantsuits and large pearls obviously only finds my last name attractive about me.

Read more on her blog at The Daily Beast — and more from BG on being bipartisan-curious!

From BG’s alter-ego, at The Daily Beast:

You probably heard that singer Chris Brown, after turning himself in for beating his girlfriend, Rihanna, enrolled in anger-management classes in an effort to, as Rolling Stone reported, “repair his image.” Swell. Where can I sign up?

Because as images go, Brown’s seems to be doing remarkably, enragingly, well. True, Brown was promptly dropped from his now-creepy Got Milk? and Wrigley’s Gum ad campaigns, and from the upcoming film, Bone Deep. And it’s not hard to find folks who have forever redacted “Forever” from their iPods. But otherwise, the whitewash seems to be flowing like Cristal at Clive Davis’ bash—and not just from the bonehead sector of the blogosphere (though yeah, there is that).

Singer Ne-Yo told MTV that Brown is still his “homeboy at the end of the day.” Kanye West reportedly asked a crowd to “Give Chris a break.” The New York Daily News asked, “Could Rihanna use [anger management] too?” CNN’s Kiran Chetry wondered if Rihanna—yes, Rihanna—might, moving forward, suffer the “stigma” of abuse. The Chicago Tribune reported that many area teens figured Rihanna must have done something to provoke Brown’s alleged assault. “People said, ‘I would have punched her around too,'” noted one sophomore. “And these were girls!”

Yes, Brown is technically innocent until proven guilty. And America believes in redemption and rehabilitation, often to its credit. But America also has a long and proud tradition of turning on celebrities quicker than you can say “Perez Hilton.” We put our stars through the wringer when they hurl cellphones at housekeepers or throw tantrums on movie sets, and in the end, rightly or wrongly, we tend to forgive them. But why is Brown, at least right now, seen as anything but Asshole of the Month? What makes it so easy for people to leap to his defense—at her expense?

Continue reading here.