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It's a sign of our celebrity-obsessed, privacy-deficient times that an Emmy-winning actor can hardly bicker with his mother over a high-end meal in a sleepy beachside community without word of that testy conversation hitting the gossip rags, as Entourage's Jeremy Piven will discover upon stumbling up the item about his alleged intrafamilial Nobu spat in today's Page Six:

IS Jeremy Piven taking his role of Ari Gold on HBO's "Entourage" a little too seriously? Spies at Nobu Malibu spotted Piven having "a very loud argument" with his own mother Friday night.

"It was so venomous, the entire restaurant could hear them. I don't know what they were arguing about, but it was loud," said the onlooker, who noted that perturbed patrons included CAA agent Rick Nicita, who was sitting at a nearby table with Rob Reiner and a group of friends. A rep for Piven did not return calls.

While it's nice to see that Piven and Nobu's management have apparently made peace with whatever transpired at their Aspen outpost earlier this year, it's disheartening to know that a fellow dinner would so sloppily eavesdrop on their conversation. For all the spy knows, Piven and his mother were merely running his Entourage lines; had he listened a little more closely, he might've heard the actor telling his mother, who'd assumed the role of put-upon assistant Lloyd in a tense scene in which their star client is in temporary jeopardy of losing yet another big job, "Listen, you incompetent pillow-biter, if you don't get Vinnie on the phone right now, I'll make sure you never hold a job better than taking William Morris dinner orders at Genghis Cohen." More importantly, he could have overheard his theater-coach mom offering the note, "Take it down a notch, baby. You've already got the Emmy, everyone knows you're a world-class screamer. Oh, and holding four cellphones while you chew him out is probably overkill."