Sometimes it’s hard to know what to say when you want to end a relationship. And if you are dating Olivia Newton-John it’s pretty much impossible to explain yourself. (I mean, she’s like the original Kylie Minogue!) But it’s time to man-up, because if you fake your own death, NBC’s Dateline WILL FIND YOU.

In an episode devoted to the mystery this week, Klein revealed that his agency had set up a hi-tech trap to help locate McDermott by making a website called findpatrickmcdermott .com, which secretly showed investigators the locations of people accessing the site.

Klein said he suspected McDermott has regularly been logging on to the “spider site”, with the team tracking hits from what he believed was a boat traveling along the Mexican coastline as far as South America.

Patrick McDermott is alive!

This story made headlines last week:

Richard Batista can live with his broken heart. He just can’t bear his cheating wife living with his healthy kidney.

The Long Island doctor wants the one-time love of his life to pay $1.5 million for the organ he bestowed on her eight years ago in a gift meant to save her life and their foundering marriage.

Dude, you have two and she gets half of everything, right? Oops, not so fast:

But divorce lawyers say a donated organ is not a marital asset to be divided.

Well, now there are counter claims from the wife!

Dawnell Batista says Richard Batista was so obsessed with the idea that she was cheating on him that he went so far as to go through her underwear seeking signs she’d been with another man.

That’s it? I thought she might sue for her old uterus back.

If you are not yet sick of science stories that tell us Love is strictly a chemical reaction, Monday’s New York Times had an interesting piece on some research being reported in the new issue of Nature.

When a female prairie vole’s brain is artificially infused with oxytocin, a hormone that produces some of the same neural rewards as nicotine and cocaine, she’ll quickly become attached to the nearest male. A related hormone, vasopressin, creates urges for bonding and nesting when it is injected in male voles (or naturally activated by sex). After Dr. Young found that male voles with a genetically limited vasopressin response were less likely to find mates, Swedish researchers reported that men with a similar genetic tendency were less likely to get married.

Writer John Tierney is much more interested in using the research to develop an anti-love vaccine that could inoculate people against quickie marriages and other ill-advised pairings. Is there something he’s not telling us?

If a gal realizes she’s in love with her man, should she keep her mouth shut? Over at Salon’s Broadsheet, Sarah Hepola chimes in on the recent CNN/The Frisky post, “Why Women Shouldn’t Say ‘I Love You’ first,” which posits, basically, that dudes can’t handle it. Sarah has a reaction many of us might:

It’s the kind of story that can’t help being irritating: First of all, because it’s a glib service piece in which advice about profound life experiences is shoehorned into a few measly grafs; second of all, because it’s dumb. It’s asinine, right?

Then she emails her guy friends who, with equal doses of articulateness and immaturity, convince her the writer may have a point. One guy friend even looks at the odds:

It’s just statistically less common to hear of girls getting weirded out and bailing on a relationship after the L word, so as a rule of thumb I think it’s fine.

Obviously there will always be special cases — and special guys — but is this basically correct?

Nothing says “I’m sorry I exerted artistic control over my previous, disappointing album and it won’t happen again” like the cover of Kelly Clarkson’s next single.

(It also says “Photoshop disaster!“)

In all the years of working on Breakup Girl — from book, to web, to tv, to oblivion, then back to web and to cell phone — Lynn and I have had a steady, third partner. His name is Mac. Apple computers have helped us write, code, design, animate and, yeah, procrastinate better over the last 14 years. For about half of that time (sigh) I’ve been working on a 867 MHz PowerMac G4 (Quicksilver).

Why am I using such an old machine? Well, to Apple’s credit, it still works! But actually, I’ve been intending to get a new desktop for the past three years — if only they would ditch the ancient G5 “cheese grater” design of the pro towers. Recently I realized I don’t need all that quad-core “pro” power to do what I do, and have had my eye on the Mac mini — but that hasn’t been updated in two years! I follow the mac rumors religiously, ‘natch, and get especially excited around the MacWorld expo.

Despite rumors going into the keynote announcements of a new mini model, Apple “only” gave us new software and a new 17″ MacBook Pro. Frankly, the rumored specs on the next mini were so good, I doubted the absent Steve Jobs would let Phil Schiller unveil it. So now I wait for the next “Apple event,” with only the web’s chief humorists as comfort for my broken heart…

Check out this keynote cartoon at xkcd.com

And this BRILLIANT nugget from The Onion News Network:

Looking for some smart writing about sex? Check out Best Sex Writing 2009, edited by Friend Of BG and cupcake aficionado Rachel Kramer Bussel. This is not a collection of erotica (drat!) but a smart — and, okay, sometimes steamy — series of essays on everyone’s favorite subject. From Rachel’s introduction:

Sex is everywhere–in our bedrooms, classrooms, courtrooms, and offices, as well as on our TV and movie screens, streets, and newspapers. This was a big year for sex, from prostitution (Eliot Spitzer, Ashley Dupré, Deborah Jeane Palfrey) to teen pregnancy (Jamie Lynn Spears, Bristol Palin) and beyond.

If you’ve gotten past the cupcake thing (Mmmmm. Cupcakes.) you are asking yourself, exactly how smart is this collection? Well, it’s so smart that they’ve included a piece by LYNN HARRIS, “Searching for Normal: Do Dating Websites for People with STIs Liberate or Quarantine?” Not tittilating enough? Try FoBG James Hannaham’s “Why Bathroom Sex Is Hot.”

Read more about it at Rachel’s Amazon blog!

We here at breakupgirl.net are not generally supportive of looking for dates on CraigsList–and certainly not the kind you have to pay for–but here’s an opportunity that’s a little different:

In order to raise some cash for Xmas gifts, Kristen Walters of Austin, Texas is auctioning off a date with her hot twin brothers! Kristen can’t babysit or mow lawns because of her muscular dystrophy, so she had to get creative. Big brother Rob was eager to help, and Ryan reluctantly agreed, reports News 8.

The auction ends Friday, and the date would be Saturday night. One brother is a web developer and the other is a firefighter–something for everybody! The bid is currently $300.

(Breakup Girl’s New Year’s Resolution: Must use power of the internet to enable hot sibling redistribution.)

A new British study of 1,031 women aged 45-60 suggests that women feel their sexiest at age 34. Also, while women in their twenties and thirties are having the most sex, women in their forties and fifties are enjoying it more.

“The fact that over half of those quizzed said they had better sex now than in their 20s and 30s suggests that these women are more confident and self-assured than they were in their younger days and aren’t afraid of getting what they want.”

This is good news for older women, and better news for me, who has been sitting on this blog title for three weeks.

My first job post-college involved coordinating continuing education programs for childbirth educators. Amniotic fluid and doulas rocked my world. No really, the whole thing shook me up. One of the more positive experiences of my entry into career-land was meeting Debra Pascali-Bonaro, the brains behind the new documentary “Orgasmic Birth.” The film entertains the idea that childbirth could actually be enjoyable, even pleasurable. Pascali-Bonaro suggests “the best kept secret” of childbirth is that as a baby exits the birth canal, the woman can experience an orgasm. Eager to know more? Check out the film on January 2 on ABC’s 20/20. Talk about being optimistic in the New Year.