1/2 — I turned the corner in the furniture aisle and saw DAVID COOK in the North Hollywood Target. He was focusing on looking down and texting as much as possible. [Hollywood PrivacyWatch is written by and for Defamer readers; send your sightings to tips@defamer.com.]

Last night, Jeremy Piven sent a very late text message to Sherri Shepherd—and for once, it didn't say "Come to my room - whoever responds first gets me for the night."

Shepherd got the ball rolling yesterday when she recounted on The View her embarrassed realization that the chapeau-clad pygmy her son had been annoying on a flight was none other than Piven himself. In response, Piven woke Shepherd up last night with a very late text message (enjoy an exhausted Barbara Walters as she then tries to explain time zone differences to a stymied panel) where he apologizes for not having recognized the View hostess. We'd have thought her confused request to the pilot—"Are there invisible angels holding this plane in the air?"—would be a tip-off. However, we're still wondering: Does Piven possess the cell phone number of every View host, or just Shepherd's? The idea of Piven stumbling out of Jones at 2am and sending a drunk text to Elisabeth Hasselbeck ("UR AYERS RANT MADE ME POP 1 TODAY") is almost as delicious as a plate of good sashimi.

• The View [ABC]

That "sold" sign on the Web space across the street from Defamer HQ finally came down today, with new, conservative neighbors Big Hollywood moving in at last. Let's go meet them, shall we?

Publisher Andrew Breitbart had promised BH for a while, with a few early posts teasing us since Sunday. But now, with editor John Nolte's official welcome and a (literal) raft of vaguely movie-centric contributions from his like-minded associates, we have a better idea of what to expect. In short, this is your grandfather's Defamer.

We've scoured pretty much the whole site to date and recommend a sort of five-course, welcome-to-the-neighborhood meal for your own first visit:

· Hors D'oeuvre: "Hollywood Loves Higher Taxes," by Melanie Graham
Tasting Notes: Flaky, with sharp, bitter aftertaste. Goes down easy in 59 words, but eat too many (e.g. "It’s the hypocritical secret here - the lefty actors and writers all incorporate themselves to avoid higher taxes but expect everyone in Rube State America to pony up"), and you'll be full before you know it.

· Appetizer: "Big Hollywood Loves the Arts," by John Nolte
Tasting Notes: Tender, if slightly greasy: "[W]e believe the arts must improve, but know that’s an impossibility until the discussion includes the ideas and ideals of everyone."

· Salad: "Does Hollywood Love Christians Now?" by Dallas Jenkins
Tasting Notes: Salty, not too heavy, with unusual and intrepid flavor pairings: "When Sony released Brokeback Mountain, they didn’t shy away from a few explicit gay sex scenes, as that would have been compromising; one wonders if they would extend the same treatment to explicit prayer or churchy scenes in a faith-based film that had a budget above $5 million."

· Entree: "'C-List' Casting Call: Will Hollywood Conservatives Come Out to Play?" by Rep. Thaddeus G. McCotter (R-MI)
Tasting Notes: Robust and buttery. A bit overcooked but likely satisfying to discriminating palates:

Republican oriented artists, however, have been involuntarily subjected to Big Hollywood’s new version of the old “blacklist’: the “C-List” of conservatives who are marked for censorship and career ruin for deviating from Left-wing orthodoxy. Nonetheless, though our specific struggles differ, we are equally embattled and immutably bonded, because we suffer for our love of America.

· Dessert: "Where Are All the Cinema Heroes Today?" by Orson Bean
Tasting Notes: Sweet, soft, falls apart when you cut into it: "[T]he movies represented a lot more than escape to me. They represented moral guidance. What I learned at home was despair and hopelessness. What I learned at the pictures was don’t give up the ship, we have only begun to fight, it’s always darkest before the dawn."

Bon appetit!

• Big Hollywood

Momma's Boys has quickly become an unhealthy Defamer preoccupation, the explosive possibilities of adding overbearing mothers to the hot-tubs-and-fake-boobs reality formula sending us into convulsive fits of trash TV ecstasy.

Last night's episode built to an electrifying showdown between the controversial Mrs. B—who's made no secret of her wish to see son JoJo settle down with a nice, white, Catholic girl (despite the fact that she herself is neither nice nor white)—and her arch nemesis, African-American candidate Misty.

Openly defying his mother's wishes, JoJo texted Misty an invite for a hot tub date—a savory comeuppance further chilled by Misty's choice to rock the sluttiest soccerwear in her carry-on for their lovers' rendezvous. A heated confrontation in the McMansion foyer required the intervention of the other girls, lest Mrs. B produce a shiv from her purse carved out of her favorite good-luck crucifix, and plunge it deep into the JoJo-possessing she-demon's dark heart.

Which brings us to the sequence above, in which producers selflessly offer Mrs. B the services of a helicopter, that she might witness JoJo engaged in an unholy interracial tongue-mashing. The results are truly amazing, for while she never actually utters the words, "What kind of autocannons and rocket launchers does this whirlybird got?! I need to INCINERATE A BITCH," she does succumb to a full-scale apoplectic seizure. After pledging to neuter her son without the use of surgical instruments—an image still seared into our cortex—Mrs. B decides to unleash her rage upon the aircraft's window. The fiery wreck that follows is only a Defamer recreation, but entirely plausible, given the circumstances.

Misty would be dismissed by JoJo at the end of the episode, excluded from next week's foray to the US Virgin Islands for having disrespected his mother—but we suspect it was too late for such reparations. Once you've pledged to squeeze off your son's own balls on national TV, there's really no turning back.

• Momma's Boys [NBC]

Benicio Del Toro deserves credit for a great many things: his Oscar-winning acting, his inspiration to the mushmouthed, and now, for crafting 2009's very first meme.

The phrasing came during a tetchy exchange with New York magazine, where Del Toro was forced to defend his regional accent in Che:

There's been some criticism about your accent in the movie. You speak in a Caribbean Spanish accent while Che Guevara had an Argentine one. Was there a reason you made that choice?
Where'd you read that?

It was mentioned in the Variety review, among other places.
What do they know? He doesn't know Spanish. You should ask someone Cuban what my Spanish sounds like. Are you one of those people that believe what they read?

No.
Well, then don't shoot it back at me, bro.

We shan't! Kudos, Mr. Del Toro, on crafting a new spin on what was becoming an old chestnut: "Don't tase me, bro." Now that we've found a suitable replacement, we shall toss that overdone phrase where memes go to die: on a Geocities page circa 1998, surrounded by flashing GIFs.

[Photo Credit: AP]

• Che’s Benicio Del Toro on Faking an Asthma Attack [New York]

Does the Spike Lee quote from The Guardian about how he's a man of means, but not Oprah-means, in today's Page Six and Huffington Post sound familiar?

It should if you read The New Yorker. [The New Yorker, Guardian]

Sean Penn and Josh Brolin appeared together at last night's New York Film Critic Circle awards dinner, where their Milk characters' rivalry reportedly gave way to a more collegial, tipsy thaw.

Penn and Brolin presented each other's prizes for Best Actor and Supporting Actor for Milk, with one attendee noting that the latter star "perhaps unnecessarily mentioned he'd been drinking." We're not sure if that admission came before or after his broadside against NYT theater critic Ben Brantley ("Honestly, I hate that motherfucker. ... And I don't think he's a good writer"), but its awareness nicely underscored his Penn introduction that followed:

"Quite an actor, Sean Penn, quite an actor. [Pause] Amazing. [Pause] And now I'm an asshole. Like Russell Crowe. Because I'm not as smart as Sean. [Pause] Quite an actor. [Pause] Amazing actor. I've loved you in Milk, I thought what you did with that role was incredible. We've known you as an actor who doesn't smile very much. And the fact that you smiled as much as you did in this film is amazing. Truly incredible. You are an amazing actor. You are going to get the Oscar. Because you smiled so much."

As expected, Penn's own ball-busting praise for Brolin — "I always wrote him off as a handsome square-jawed actor...There's no one who's as big a nightmare as him. ... No one has much endurance at night and as little during the day" — had the venue security guards' hands on their tasers. But! Crisis averted, at least until Sunday's open-bar Golden Globe Awards. We're pulling for you, Josh!

• At New York Film Critics Circle, Brolin being Brolin [Risky Biz Blog]

Aside from Fisher Stevens, everyone knows that Jeremy Piven's play-quitting sushi defense is bogus (but delicious!). However, E! is now alleging that Piven never actually quit—he was fired.

That's according to E!'s Ted Casablanca...wait! Don't click away! A productive intern has made the usually incomprehensible gossip guru semi-intelligible—just look:

"He was fired," says an integral player in the David Mamet play, about the banal evils of Hollywood. Yep, according to our pivotal insider, J.P. got booted for diva-like behavior. Like what? Like showing up two minutes before showtime, being a general d-bag toward the cast and crew and sending his understudy on if he didn't like the size of the audience.

"He wanted out of his contract for about a month—he was trying to get out of it," says another major Plow player, claiming the Emmy-winner was "disappointed" doin' it live night after night. The mercury poisoning excuse was a way out to save face.

Since we would never impeach Casablanca's credentials and the stories of Piven misbehavior certainly sound true, we've got some advice for the producers of Speed-the-Plow: if you're planning on firing your most famous actor, maybe use the meantime to line up a backup actor with more star power than Norbert Leo Butz. You coulda had the guy from Wings! No, the other guy. No, not Shalhoub! No, not the Sideways one, either. Steven Weber!

• Was Jeremy Piven Fired? [E!]

As if nearly exposing Lisa Rinna's snickerdoodle to a horrified America wasn't enough, Richard Simmons's campaign of meal-dealing terror continues to devastate Manhattan.

In addition to reliving the scissor-kicking devastation, we offer two more shocking acts perpetrated by Simmons on live TV in recent hours: On CNN's American Morning, Simmons offered a demonstration of the advanced shrimping techniques that helped him curb his cravings for actual shellfish, melting away the pounds and lowering his cholesterol in the process. And finally, a visit to the Fox News studios, the Jewfroed weight-loss guru molests a number of camera operators and crew—an act of personal violation so heinous, it's sure to be met with swift, concrete-boot retribution from the Teamsters union. [CNN American Morning]

ZACHARY QUINTO, TV's Sylar and Spock in the upcoming J. J. Abrams Star Trek installment, out for a quiet Italian dinner with a friend at Prizzi's Piazza on Franklin. [Hollywood PrivacyWatch is written by and for Defamer readers; send your sightings to tips@defamer.com.]