Neel Shah got his scandal-phone returned; Kevin Marks got retweeted by ghosts and Al Yankovic was surrounded by nobodies. The Twitterati were haunted, in a good way.

This is the media life on Twitter: Readers daring to call on the phone, bloggers taking each other out to lunch, and blowhard predictions made about blowhard predictions! Today's Twitterati:

Karen Tumulty of Time told us how senators handle their snuff. John Battelle explained why tweets seem so brainless. But who stole a Wired editor's lunch? Twitter still has secrets.

Reading the latest in the spat between Wired's Epicenter blog and Michael Arrington over the Washington Post's deal to syndicate TechCrunch articles and the ethical propriety of the TechCrunch editor's investments in startups his blog covers, I noticed that the post was in the category "ButtMunch." The latest post states that "We have nothing against Arrington," but the tag originated last week in a post that accused TechCrunch of pilfering a story angle related to Steve Ballmer's continued tenure at Microsoft in the wake of the Yahoo deal.

Megan McCarthy, who since October 2006 has covered the Silicon Valley party circuit for Valleywag and become bizarrely famous in Germany along the way, starts at Wired in two weeks. Instead of drinking startup founders under the table, she'll be fetching doppio venti extra-hot raspberry white soy milk mochas for Epicenter blog editor Dylan Tweney, who himself once wrote for Valleywag — we're all dizzy now. Megan (pronounced meh-gan around here) will continue posting for us until she makes the switch. Please, please please send her out with a big scoop. (Photo by Mike Calore)