While doing interviews before the new 90210 premiered, star Jennie Garth always seemed to imply that she wanted to call her old co-stars, really she did, but something always got in the way! When Tori Spelling was axed over salary disputes, a stumped Garth attempted to get in contact with her solely through the pages of Entertainment Weekly, and when Shannen Doherty was added to the recurring cast, Garth asked for her number and then stared at her phone as if willing it to rise into the air, dialing on its own. Now, Garth tells OK! that her selective telephonophobia continues to this day:

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang publicly pines for another bid from Microsoft. On stage at the Web 2.0 Summit conference yesterday, he said, again, that he was open to talks. Microsoft has taken pains to say it's not interested. But really, besides corporate raider Carl Icahn, who cares? A new leadership team, all with lengthy Microsoft resumes, has taken over key parts of Yahoo.Joanne Bradford, a longtime sales chief at MSN who later headed up Microsoft's content operations, now runs U.S. sales. Jeff Dossett, after a protracted job dance with both Microsoft and Yahoo, just took over Yahoo's "audience" group, which oversees its media websites. And Eric Hadley, another longtime Microsoftie, has just gotten a job running marketing. The three all know each other well from MSN and form a tight-knit cabal. And one thing drove them from Microsoft to Yahoo: Microsoft's senseless obsession with Google. MSN has always been an oddball operation at Microsoft. Is it not, at its heart, a media company. That Google figured out a way to turn attracting an online audience and selling advertising into an algorithm infuriated Microsoft's leadership — but the thought that the Web might be a software business after all held a deep attraction to them. Google's strength is in search advertising. And search advertising is bought, while display advertising is sold. Keyword ads practically sell themselves, while banner ads require the careful cultivation of human links between Web publishers and advertisers. In their display-ads sales, Microsoft and Yahoo both took their eye off the ball, distracted by Google. Microsoft will remain distracted, possibly for all time. But Yahoo is beginning to rebuild an ad-sales operation badly wounded by Yahoo president Sue Decker's mishandling of sales chief Wenda Harris Millard. That's what Bradford, Dossett, and Hadley have figured out. If there's still a role for humans in the packaging of audiences for advertisers, it's going to be filled at Yahoo, not Microsoft. It is a chancy, contrarian bet; running up against both Google and Microsoft takes guts. But it's no coincidence that so many Microsoft executives are now at Yahoo.

Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi on Obama's merits: "He's young, handsome and tanned." Eh, what do you expect from an Italian? [Guardian]

The political leanings of Broadcom's former CEO, Henry Nicholas III, make for some post-election headscratching. Proposition 6 was one of the two state ballot measures he had underwritten and supported — to the price tag of $6 million — to increase penalties for gang and drug crimes, even satellite tracking of sex offenders. Nicholas is the same guy who is under federal indictment for felony drug use and conspiracy, building out sex dungeons for liaisons with prostitutes, and securities fraud. Good thing voters didn't pass it.

Oh, good one. The smaller text on this ad (for a website that sells college info) gives all of Barack and Michelle Obama's Ivy League credentials. The payoff line: "From Bush League to the Ivy League." See, everything's better now that Ivy League grads will be in charge! Except that George W. Bush went to Yale and Harvard. Taste the failure, Ivy League. Failure of all you stand for. Click for the big version. [via Adrants]

We weren't kidding when we presaged a renaissance for Jean-Claude Van Damme, whose Cannes hit JCVD — an indie satire featuring the action star as a forlorn, tormented version of his once ass-kicking self — is drawing high praise ahead of its limited US release this weekend. Eighty percent of critics at Rotten Tomatoes are behind it, but frankly, as they're part of the reason Van Damme was ever a punchline in the first place: To hell with them. A new pair of interviews with the Phoenix of Belgium sums up all you need to know about a comeback that makes Mickey Rourke's look puny in comparison.After all, Rourke — an Oscar frontrunner for his turn in The Wrestler — once grazed on Hollywood's A-list pasture, from which banishment amounted to losing an opportunity that genre hero Van Damme never really had. He's still technically in the action ghetto, by most estimations, but he told Details that he exceeded his Timecop-era chops by just skipping the "acting" part altogether:

Who pays attention to unions anymore? A bunch of carpenters picket your office because of a grievance with a contractor who works for the facilities department of the company on the floor below you. They might as well stencil WE ARE POWERLESS on their placards. But a couple of Los Angeles traffic engineers who work for that city's Automated Traffic Surveillance Center found a way to make "strike" an active verb again: They disabled four traffic lights at major intersections a couple of hours before a job action. The red-light gridlock lasted four days until the PHBs figured out how to reprogram things. Gabriel Murillo, 39, and Kartik Patel, 36 admitted to felony hacking as part of a plea bargain. I'm sure it sucked for commuters, but at least they didn't turn all the lights green. (Photo by AP/Nam Y. Huh)

So much for Daniel and Isabella. "Barack" is poised to become a big baby name thanks to his victory on Tuesday. A number of new moms in Kenya have reportedly named their newborns after the President-elect in recent days, and it isn't just limited to Barack's first name. "Michelle" is expected to grow in popularity, too, and one South Florida couple even named their son "Obama" on Wednesday. [Reuters]

No federal charges will be filed against former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. Spitzer slept with a prostitute, a million years ago last March, after a little more than a year on the job. He was in danger of federal charges because he paid for his ladyfriend, Ms. Ashley Dupre, to travel across state lines, a violation of the ridiculous and archaic Mann Act, and also because he might've done some weird illegal stuff with the money he used to pay the prostitution ring. The US Attorney for New York has a funny statement:

Revolution! "We hope that everyone would treat [each other] with civility, with respect and with love no matter which side of this issue they were on," said Elder L. Whitney Clayton, of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Presidency of the Seventy. Just in case the angry crowds protesting the gay marriage ban overwhelmingly underwritten by out-of-state Mormon dollars don't feel the same way, however, precautions are already being taken to ensure things don't get out of hand. A reader working at the BET offices near the Mormon Temple sends us this shot, where police line tape has already gone up in anticipation of the 2 p.m. rendezvous. [Defamer]

Election euphoria hasn't stopped waves of layoffs. "The number of out-of-work Americans continuing to draw unemployment benefits has surged to a 25-year high," reports the AP today. With that in mind, it's another round of layoff... horror stories. Today's tales go out in tribute to the very recently downsized employees at Hearst (Redbook, Good Housekeeping), Time Inc., and the Village Voice. Holla! (Wanna send us your anonymous anecdotes? Write tips@gawker.com.) Today, we hear tales of crying, drinking, and a well-placed "Fuck you.""Fuck You":

Is Halsey Minor the "bad boy of Silicon Valley," as Portfolio recently dubbed him? The moniker may not be geographically precise — the founder of CNET turned venture capitalist has a house in San Francisco, not Woodside or Atherton. But what the magazine really should have called him was the bad boy of the blogosphere. Minor obsessively comments on stories about him, with detailed but completely off-topic critiques of the writer's prose. Take, for example, his reaction to the post Thomson Reuters reporter Connie Loizos wrote about Minor's failed attempts to buy a racetrack in Florida:

Sure, Kendra Wilkinson's brand of well-endowed spunk might not go over so well with Tom Brady or Hugh Hefner's new, face-kicking twins, but this Girl Next Door alumna only has eyes for the man she's supposedly been seeing since August, football player Hank Baskett. Now, Baskett has popped the question, and only E!'s typically incomprehensible Ted Casablanca has the story of how it went down:

Boy, CNN's election-night magic hologram technology was a hit! And all for the low, low price of $300,000 to $400,000. Money is no object in these times of plenty! Today, CNN boy wonder Anderson Cooper learns how the magic was made—and then is treated to the amazing sight of his colleague Erica Hill disappearing with a snap of her fingers! Too bad CNN moved AC's laptop in the jump cut, or it would have really looked convincing. Click to watch the poor trickery of cable news in action.

I love Dave Winer's blog. He's even crazier than me, but he's pathologically unable to lie. Winer's latest post admits something most Californians would deny: The first time he learned a friend was married to another guy instead of a gal, he blurted out, "I find this shocking and it makes me a bit uncomfortable." He got over it, but he remembers that feeling. Dave, don't ever change. Remember when you found out I was working for Denton? That was hilarious. (Photo by tobiashm)

♦ The first looks from Thakoon's Target collection are online, and they're very Talitha Getty. [Nylon]
♦ Stay far away from 52nd and Fifth this evening, unless you want to catch the desire to wear candy-colored velour: Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor are throwing a launch party for Juicy Couture's new store. [Page Six]
♦ It's not only Lindsay Lohan who has seen the potential in leggings: The spring lines from labels like Rodarte and Threeasfour feature printed, cut-out or slashed leggings. [stylefile]
♦ Fashion designer Lisa Perry, lover of all things '60s (and wife of hedge funder Richard), is opening a store in SoHo tomorrow. [The Daily]

If wireless Internet access is such a hot technology, why is it such a dud business? I asked that question in Wired five years ago, and I still don't know the answer. Since then, eager-to-please Wi-Fi startups have gone the way of boutique ISP service. AT&T, once broken up by law for being an evil monopoly, has reassembled itself into the dominant telecom brand again — bad service and all. This morning, a press release out of Texas announced that AT&T will acquire privately held Wayport, which operates 10,000 hotspots at locations from McDonald's to the Four Seasons. For $275,000,000 in cash, AT&T will now double its number of Wi-Fi hotspots. I side with the Wall Street Journal's snap analysis: Maybe this will make up in part for all those customers canceling their AT&T home phones.

If Toyota's "Saved By Zero" commercial makes you want to hurt yourself, or someone else (not to mention has ensured you'll never buy a Toyota as long as you live), you're not alone. The "Stop Playing Toyota's 'Saved by Zero' Commercial" group on Facebook now has 2,394 members. [AdFreak]

We hear that there were four editorial layoffs at Good Housekeeping today as part of the broader Hearst layoffs we mentioned yesterday. And FishbowlNY reports 20 layoffs at M. Shanken Communications, the publisher of Cigar Aficionado, Wine Spectator, and Food Arts. And Eric Schurenberg, the managing editor of Money, was laid off today as part of the Time Inc. layoffs.

· The first day after the election earned low ratings all around for the networks, but particularly NBC, whose new crime block of Knight Rider, Life, and the 19th season premiere of Law & Order (down 42% from last year) all tanked. [THR] · Jack Black is set to star in Fox's adaptation of Gulliver's Travels, in which he'll teach the tiny denizens of Lilliput the building blocks of Rock and Roll. [Variety] · 9-and-a-half-fingered Congressman Rahm Emanuel has accepted Barack Obama's offer of White House chief of staff, and now goes about the task of rounding out the cabinet. Drama for Minister of Viking Affairs! [Variety] After the jump: What Oscar-nominated actress and Oscar-winning actor will co-star in a Lifetime movie?· Lifetime MOWs are now officially prestige affairs: Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons will star in a biopic on the life of Georgia O'Keefe for the women's network, directed by Bob Balaban. [THR] · James Van Der Beek and David "Pam's Ex" Denman will star in Fox pilot Eva Adams, about "an egotistic sexist agent who, under a witch's spell, turns into a beautiful woman so he can endure the harassment he's been dishing out." A magical comedy of errors! Shakespeare would be proud, Van Der Beek. [THR]