So are country singers - who seem fated to live out the achy-breaky melodrama of their music - and cult television shows.

They still hadn't gotten over that one when the city's Division I college basketball teams got in on the achy-breaky endings.

Will he have to do the Achy-Breaky?

Just no achy-breaky heart.

An achy-breaky embarrassment.

In one video, he turned himself into an ad-campaign cowboy singing achy-breaky songs, satirizing Nashville while also twanging his heart out.

At its sweetest, her voice suggests a blunter, twangier country cousin of Ms. Ronstadt's achy-breaky throb.

He performs country music in Polish and English, complete with achy-breaky dancing girls in denim miniskirts and cowboy boots.

How many other girlfriends, counselors, taxi drivers, and random airplane passengers had Boris seduced into intimacy with the mournful ballad of his achy-breaky reproductive apparatus?

Miley's mum and dad, Billy Ray and his wife, Tish, have reportedly called off divorce proceedings, intent instead on fixing their achy-breaky marriage.

Achy-breaky hearts August 30 [TOP] Breakup Girl This great site has a zany comic book feel to it.

It's an achy-breaky narrative, heavy on the pedal steel guitar, about a woman who returns to her hometown after 23 years and, among other things, falls in love with a beery old redneck named Dayrell.

Kelly Clarkson - "Never Again" Kelly's "Since U Been Gone" trafficked in similar achy-breaky fare, but that song was as sweet as a Barney singalong compared to this vicious diatribe.

Can the fiddles and steel guitars and the yearning, achy-breaky heart lyrics that make up the backbone of much country music actually transform a group of normally aggressive New Yorkers into more cooperative, laid-back group of partners?

Yes, there are still hurt-pride hunks like Billy Ray Cyrus pining over their achy-breaky hearts; the homefires-burning housewife that Reba McIntyre sings about will continue to look out the window and wonder "Is There Life Out There?"

A personal tragedy throws Karen Kijewski's Sacramento operative for a loop in STRAY KAT WALTZ (Putnam, $22.95), accounting for an achy-breaky tone (and some embarrassing writing) that doesn't suit Kat's clearheaded style.

Although he inhabits the same mean streets of Manhattan as Matt Scudder, the brooding private eye who is Mr. Block's most celebrated hero, Bernie has a whimsical sense of humor that shields him from the achy-breaky Weltschmerz of his hard-boiled literary sibling.