Earlier this summer, the New York media world was rocked by the departure of Page Six reporter/mascot Neel Shah, who moved to Los Angeles to pursue a writing career with the upcoming NBC/Imagine Entertainment sitcom "Friends With Benefits." Shah's West Coast exploits have remained unreported, but now sources close to the former Postie tell us that, not content with working solely behind the camera, he is making plans to put himself in front of it. READ MORE

I spent yesterday at Sharron Angle for Senate Campaign Headquarters, in a strip mall in northern Las Vegas. The phonebank volunteers were targeting likely Angle supporters in rural parts of the state to take advantage of early voting, which ended last night. Most of my fellow volunteers (I was, I believe, the only fake volunteer) were over fifty—with the exception of Summer and Jordan, two bubbly seventeen-year-olds who both had family in the military—and white and not originally from Nevada. By coincidence, the three women in my adjoining cubby were from all from Pennsylvania, having moved to Nevada after their children were grown. The ladies, with their various shades of silver hair, would take a few minutes between phonecalls to gab, mostly about Social Security: how much they were getting, where it was all going and the general future of the entitlement program. READ MORE

"I was told that if I played this song, I'd get a lot of people on the dance floor," said Jeff the DJ. He had been absentmindedly scrolling through his iTunes. The next words came from Gloria Gaynor, proclaiming that she had been, at first, both afraid and petrified. A handful of women came to the center of the dance floor, ignoring the men. This song was for the women. They'd earned it. And you don't have to be a shrink to understand why I Will Survive had a resonance at the California Cougar Convention at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Beverly Hills. READ MORE

In case you were curious about whether the crazed reaction to Obama's Nobel Peace Prize began immediately upon Thorbjørn Jagland's announcement, now comes this account from a reporter present at the event in Oslo itself. "[A] collective gasp had gone up in the room, the kind I'd thought reserved for dramatic reenactments in made-for-TV documentaries. A sound like a room of owls hooting followed, and then everyone was talking at once. Jagland raised his voice as he continued to read from the citation, struggling to be heard above the clamor. Behind the chairman, Lundestad, the committee's ever-serious secretary, tried to suppress a smirk before giving up and letting it burst into a toothy, dimpled smile.... After Jagland finished reading the citation, the over-caffeinated journalists could hardly contain themselves. They fired off questions like grenade lobs. Most were less questions than slightly rephrased criticisms."

Abnormally interesting town hall meetings have caused some in Congress to make their August events invitation-only. This tactic, a favorite of the Bush administration, has been bemoaned by the right as cowardice. Senator Byron Dorgan, who puts the D in the Red State of ND, went ahead and held meetings anyway. I went to a few to see what the fuss was all about. (Hint: It's not about health care.) READ MORE