Surf On: Reports that a cancer-stricken Patrick Swayze had suffered a setback and said goodbye to his friends and family are false, said the actor. "It's a battle, and so far, I've been winning. I'm one of the lucky few that responds well to treatment," he told People magazine. Still, he had a word or two for the dark-sided media that's been tracking his health: "It's upsetting that the shoddy and reckless reporting from these publications cast a negative shadow on the positive and good fight I'm fighting." [People]

Tragedy of the elite: we hear that Sheryl WuDunn, the wife of Times columnist Nick Kristof, has been laid off from her job as a private wealth advisor at Goldman Sachs—a casualty of Goldman's plan to cut 10% of staff. She was a longtime journalist, and wrote for the Times, Reuters, and the WSJ before going into banking. She married Kristof in 1988 and won a Pulitzer in 1990 for her reporting in Beijing. Rather ironic that the journalist in the family is now the breadwinner over the banker, no? The lesson here: just when you thought you were getting out of the crappy journalism industry... it PULLS YOU BACK IN! And lays you off at your new job. Care to watch Nick and Sheryl appear together on Charlie Rose back in happier days? Then click through to do so!

♦ Sue Torres is leaving her post Los Dados to spend more time at Sueños, her restaurant in Chelsea. [NYT]
♦ Photos of David Burke's Fishtail, which opened last night. [Eater]
♦ Anita Lo plans to close Bar Q for a few days so she can reopen it with a more finger-food-friendly menu. [GS]
♦ Susanne Bartsch is moving the weekly party she used to throw at Happy Valley to Greenhouse and calling it Vandam. [GS]
♦ The Upper West Side's Neptune Room is now closed. [Eater]
♦ You can celebrate Britney's birthday at Tenjune tonight, if you wish. [DBTH]

Despite the best efforts of Young Jeezy, T.I., and Ludacris, the Democrats look to be stuck at 58 seats in the US Senate, two shy of the magic filibuster-proof majority. Georgia's runoff election between Senator Saxby Chambliss and challenger Jim Martin (pictured, above) is going on right now! And turnout seems to be low. Meanwhile in Minnesota, Al Franken faces some pretty damning math in his recount battle with Norm Coleman. Already, the age of Hope and Change is over!

Though she's had limited success retaining acting jobs or remarking about our nation's first "colored" president, it's comforting to know that Lindsay Lohan still has one thing left she can excel at: penning Myspace blogs. Still, even Lohan is aware that Myspace is so 2006, and thus, she's attempted to join the mass migration to Facebook. Sadly, Facebook promptly deleted her account, prompting Lohan to flee back to Myspace for an anti-Facebook rant (which, like any anti-Facebook rant, would not be complete without a complaint about the site's new redesign):

It's the last thing cash-strapped banks need right now: Holders of credit and debit cards are reporting an epidemic of unauthorized charges on their bills. It could be the sign of a massive card-fraud operation in the making. A company called Adele Services, based in Melville, N.Y., has been charging cards small amounts — 21 to 29 cents. Such charges are usually attempts by card fraudsters to test whether a particular card number is valid.

It's hard to imagine a tougher real estate client than Alex Rodriguez and Madonna. But some poor broker is now helping the duo hunt for a "love nest" on the Upper East Side, at least according to today's Post. Naturally, not just any apartment will do. The couple is looking to spend between $30 and $60 million on a townhouse between Park and Fifth Avenues (between East 60th Street and the 80s) and, ideally, they'd like a place with a garage so they can drive right in without having to push their way past a gaggle of photographers. Sadly, there aren't very many townhouses with garages on the market at the moment. But if A-Rod and Madge can concede on that one point, we rounded up their five best options, which you can review for yourself below.

· Shia LaBeouf will star in an adaptation of John Grisham's The Associate, which is about a Yale Law School undergrad who takes a job at a shady law firm, gets in over his head, then ends up getting chased down a long stretch of abandoned highway by a single car for some reason. We understand they are writing his mangled pinkie nail into the plot, the result of a gavel mishap in moot court. [Variety]
· Courtney B. Vance and Jack Davenport will star in Flash Forward, the ABC pilot in which the world blacks out for 2 minutes and 17 seconds, and slowly learns it slept with the cankled girl from accounts receivable in the parking garage after the Christmas party. [THR]
· What if you threw a big, sweeping, historical epic and not even the people it's about bothered to show up? We hate to say this, but we're beginning to think Baz Lurhmann should have added Australian pop classics and made it a musical. The whole thing is based on that Men at Work song, anyway. ("I met a strange lady, she made me nervous / She took me in and gave me breakfast" etc...) [Variety]

Next Monday is Wendi Deng's birthday, just in case you're looking for something fun to add to your datebook or you happen to be a close, personal friend and you've yet to pick up a suitable gift. So what does the notoriously demanding third wife of Rupert Murdoch have planned for the big event? "According to a source with knowledge of the planning, the Murdochs have booked the top floor of the Gramercy Park Hotel, where their guests will include Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, Billy Joel, and Arianna Huffington. A portion of the six-figure budget went towards booking the Chinese pianist Lang Lang to play a 20-minute set." [Portfolio]

Agency Spy has heard that the two ad agency staffers caught in flagrate delicto on the infamous Ad Agency Sex Tape last week have been fired. They also note the widespread rumor that the ad agency in question is Atmosphere BBDO. The agency declined to comment to us. In an anonymous interview last week, a man claiming to be the cameraman of the sex tape said he was fired for filming it. We're working on confirming the truth of all this for you—more information TK.

The co-writer and producer of last summer's X Files: I Want to Believe has a theory about why the film flopped with $21 million — one you might expect from someone who writes about aliens, but which surprises nevertheless.

As the Oscar derby reaches its Winslet-duelling, Australia-gutting heights, there are only a handful of films that can survive. We've had a look at the current conventional wisdom, and here are three rising Oscar contenders that could stand to have a few holes poked in them. (Some spoilers for the synopsis-averse may ensue.)

Jason Calacanis, the mop-haired founder of Mahalo, an overfunded Web directory, is musing on Twitter about "tickers and rallies past" — a Proustian substitution of stock markets for madeleines. But what, exactly, does he have to be nostalgic for?

[The always-delightful Heidi Klum, model and TV host, doing something for the Today Show; image via Splash]

This blog has been making fun of and predicting death for Conde Nast social networking site Flip.com since early 2007, when Flip was only a few months old. Our skepticism was based on the observation that the idea of spending millions of dollars building a social networking site for teen girls based on flipbooks is dumb. And now it appears that our predecessors were prescient, because Fashionista is reporting that Flip is shutting down for good on Dec. 16th. Duh. If you have more information, email us. UPDATE: It's official. The death notice sent to Flip.com users is below:

Simon Doonan's terrifically useful advice for surviving the recession and looking your very best? Take whatever money you still have left and give it to him! No matter how bad things get, Doonan says, you should be sure to continue shopping and keep up your "fierce and meaningful allegiance to, for example, Barneys and Jonathan Adler." Also: "Snag yourself a personal shopper who can streamline the process." And where do you find one of those? Easy! "Call Pat Drake at Barneys—she used to be a Rockette!—or email her at pdrake@barneys.com, and she will get you hooked up." And if you have any cash left over, you can always meet up with Jonathan for a $10,000 lunch. [NYO]

Because when it comes to melodramatic Lost promos set to the essential catalogue of The Fray—the soundtrack of our lives, really—too much is never enough, we bring you the seventh Lost trailer, featuring some rearranged footage you've already seen and that song you love so much! (This one doesn't actually feature the band, though fret not: We understand they do crash land on the magically reappearing island, where they are swiftly put to work putting out a subpar Nickelback single every 108 minutes—or everything will explode!) In case you've forgotten where we've left off last season, giant, swooshing intertitles helpfully remind us that "6 WERE RESCUED...THE REST...WE HAVE NO F&*%@ING CLUE BUT HOPEFULLY WE'LL GET THAT SORTED OUT." Needless to say, we're so there—hairy-chested Jack or not. [Lost]

Extremely tall man David Gregory will be your next host of Meet the Press. He's still famous mostly for dancing and for arguing with Bush press secretaries, which proves that he's a serious journalist, and it also served the press well to look like it was totally standing up to Bush just as it served the administration well to look like innocent victims of the liberal media. That is how the world works. Who knows how he'll perform on that show, because frankly the format itself is outdated and useless. The late Tim Russert was no prize either, friends. But Gregory is just... kind of annoying.

We hate to beat a dead kangaroo here, but that Australia is showing signs of becoming an epic flop. It's not even doing well in Australia! The country where it was filmed and takes place and was, we suspect, named after! Variety reports that the film has basically done good but not great business since it opened Down Under. Was it overhyped? Variety seems to think so:

Awards season's most reliably confusing nominations broke this morning, with the 2008 Independent Spirit Award nods recognizing everything and everyone from Anne Hathaway to Towelhead to Woody Allen and self-distributed Sundance darlings.