Tom Hanks, cat head. (YouTube)

– We know: it's getting dark earlier, the elections are tomorrow and we're still suffering the fallout from last week's hurricane. (Um, not to mention the nor'easter headed our way on Wednesday. FUN!) On the other hand, here are some videos of Tom Hanks being really confused on a German sketch show called Wetten Daas!

http://youtu.be/PoXR2ibRx40
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJvFdi-scLg
– The owner of New York's Beach Bum Tanning Salon, where Amanda Bynes may or may not have stripped down in the lobby and run around like a crazy person: "Employee testimony and security footage have confirmed that Ms. Bynes was not acting inappropriately. She is a long-time client and we stand by her account." So wrote CEO James Oliver claimed in an official press release. But how much do we trust the word of a Beach Bum?

– Brad Pitt has done enough with this humanitarian stuff. From now on, it's all perfume ads and designing 24-karat-gold tables.

– Courtney Love, perpetual buzzkill, won't let a Nirvana musical happen. Hey, for once we agree with her.

British miniseries knows what you want to see.

– In her continuing efforts to upstage that total biatch Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Bynes decided to strip down in a tanning salon lobby in New York and run around screaming "I'm a retired multi-millionaire!!" Said an eyewitness, "There was definitely something wrong with her." What do you think it was?

– Gwyneth Paltrow is totally over her Brooklyn love. Now she's on to only talking about really important stuff in GOOP ... like wrapping paper that costs $52.

– James Franco wants to fine people who don't vote. Possibly to raise money for his next performance art project.

– Jerry Seinfeld alone could probably finance the reconstruction of NYC with his Seinfeld residuals.

– You know, we had heard rumblings on IMDB about a Jon Hamm/Daniel Radcliffe Sky Arts 1 HD series, A Young Doctor's Notebook, in which they play the older and younger versions, respectively, of a Russian Ph.D. But this is the first time we've seen pictures of them in a bathtub together, which is a very Terrence Malick way to shoot your bloody show.

Lady Gaga's maternity wear (Getty Images)

— The Church of Scientology has written a strongly-worded letter to Vanity Fair about Maureen Orth's cover story on Tom Cruise and the woman auditioned to be his girlfriend, Nazanin Boniadi. It's eight pages long. In it, the church threatens, "If Vanity Fair goes forward with publication of such defamatory allegations, now that it is on notice that the story is false, the stain on its reputation will last long after any reader even remembers the article. The sting of the jury verdict will last longer still; far longer than any pleasure from racing to publish a poorly researched and sourced story."

— Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively is eating more food than she normally eats, and you know what that means ... healthier body images for women on television! Just kidding. The only explanation is that she's hiding a secret pregnancy with a shotgun wedding to Ryan Reynolds.

— Lady Gaga is also pregnant, according to reliable source Kelly Osbourne. She's going off the fact that Gaga stopped bleaching her hair and wore a burka to Fashion Week, but she totally forgot the fact that the singer smoked weed on stage in Amsterdam Tuesday. Lady Gaga says she's just fat.

— Fiona Apple is in jail in Sierra Blanca, Texas, for having hash on her tour bus.

— Amanda Bynes continues to go toe-to-toe with Lindsay Lohan for the title of world's biggest train wreck. She also happens to be the most histrionic train wreck, believing that Ms. Lohan's recent car crash was "karma" for the Mean Girl’s mean tweet about her.

Ms. Zellweger was attending a private luncheon to celebrate Living Proof, a Lifetime original movie on which she was an executive producer about a doctor who works to find a cure for breast cancer.

The two women embraced, after which Ms. Herrera promptly departed before everyone sat down to eat. But Ms. Zellweger didn’t seem to mind as she had plenty more people to greet. After all, Ron Perelman had just walked in. ("Hey Peggs!" he shouted in the direction of publicist Peggy Siegal, who was lining the tables with name cards—Liz Smith, Bonnie Fuller, Trudie Styler—and shuffling guests around at the last minute.) And there was Ms. Zellweger’s dear friend, Christiane Amanpour.

"Renee and I are old friends," Ms. Amanpour told the Daily Transom. "She is very smart about current affairs—she wanted to be a journalist in her previous life—and so we catch up and talk about the election and what's happening overseas."

Speaking of the election, the Daily Transom was briefly distracted by a guest who had placed a baseball hat that read “Democrats for McCain” at the center of his eight-person table. Given that the room was full of New Yorkers who have likely attended quite a few Barack Obama fund-raisers in the last year, a lively discussion was taking place by the table. (“But she’s more qualified than Obama,” the gentleman was saying to a young woman.)

We wondered if despite Ms. Amanpour's busy schedule and frequent travels overseas, she was the type of gal to curl up on the couch with a blanket and a box of tissues for a Lifetime movie.

"No, it's not for me," she said. "But it's mostly because I grew up in Iran so I never watched it. I am really here for my friend Renee."

The Lifetime Network has gone through a transformation of sorts. The channel that used to be known for over-the-top original movies about abusive boyfriends or eating disorders--who can ever forget For the Love of Nancy?--recently convinced Harvey Weinstein to move Project Runway over from Bravo, and has attracted more recognizable faces like Mena Suvari, Marcia Gay Harden, and John Stamos for its films.

"It was really treated like a feature film, it really was," noted Harry Connick Jr., the lead in Living Proof, when the Daily Transom found him mingling with guests. "The level of people that were involved from a production point of view to the talent, it really felt like a feature."

And 22-year-old Amanda Bynes, also a star in the film, said that she has also noticed a difference with the network that she used to turn on for reruns of the Golden Girls.

"With Renee Zellwegger producing this, it's definitely a classy project and the network is just getting..." Here Ms. Bynes paused. "It's just getting cooler."

"What we're doing is elevating the talent," said Lifetime's senior VP of original movies Tanya Lopez. "Lifetime movies are like comfort food, but we're just saying 'step it up a bit!' It doesn't all have to be so earnest.

"We just got very comfortable before and the audiences didn't seem to mind, so we decided to shake the tree a bit and then everyone suddenly went, 'Oh!'" she continued. "In December we'll have Heather Locklear and Robert Buckley and that just says happy holidays!"