Newest Gossip Girl cast member Michelle Trachtenberg really knows what she's doing as evil, conniving underminer Georgina Sparks. As it turns out, the 22-year-old is drawing on her own painful teen experience: The Harriet the Spy star was, she told us last night at the launch party for Gen Art's Styles International Design Competition, "tortured" by her classmates at her L.A. private school. "Everyone knew who I was, and a lot of people resented that, so I actually had quite a difficult school experience," she said. "I cannot say that I have any childhood school friends." Really? We can't imagine why not. They were obviously just jealous, we said. So, how was she tortured?

Last night New York's Jada Yuan went to the premiere of the HBO movie Recount, starring Laura Dern, Kevin Spacey, Bob Balaban, and Ed Begley Jr. The film relives what happened during the highly intense battle that took place between the day of the 2000 contested presidential election and the final decision by the Supreme Court that declared George Bush president. In the above video, see what Dern thought of being cast as Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, how one Daily Show writer would have rewritten the ending, and just how difficult a butterfly ballot can be.

Party Lines: 'Recount' Premiere [NYM Video]

At the release party for Bernadette Peter's new children's book, Broadway Barks (titled after the awareness event of the same name), headline actors of the stage and screen stepped aside to give their beloved pooches the spotlight. Brian Stokes Mitchell raved about his family's canine companion for what seemed like hours, and Mary Tyler Moore admitted that she really worries about her dogs when she's away — "I'm like a parent of children." Everyone had a story about an eager animal waiting at home, except Angela Lansbury.

"Well, actually, I haven't had a dog in a number of years," she told us. Lansbury is 82, but it's not for lack of vitality that she's going without (she couldn't get a cab to the party, so she walked). No, the reason is much simpler: heartache. "I can't bear to leave them. I did have a dog, a little poodle, which, sadly, was so upset when I went to do a play in New York that he just walked away." She was living in California at the time, and when she got home, she led extensive efforts to locate the wandering poodle, but with no success. It "walked away"??? This is perhaps the saddest thing we ever heard. These days she lets her grandchildren handle the dogs in the family, because she's still too busy to commit. "I refuse to have a dog now unless I can stay in one place to nurture it." Cheyenne Jackson and his boyfriend may have settled down and adopted a five-months-old Rottweiler, but Angela Lansbury is so far still playing the field. —Benjamin Proffer

If you head over to Martha Stewart's blog today, you can see the results of her very exciting Internet poll over what she should name her two new cows. Noelle and Jessica Coen yesterday thought that the cows were ugly little buggers, but Intel editor Chris thinks they're actually kind of cute. When we ran into Martha at the Time 100 last night, naturally we asked her about her two new friends. Was she rooting for any two names in particular? "I don’t get to have a favorite, but the public favorite is Ben and Jen, after Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner, because she named her dog after me," Martha said. "I think they would be very pleased to have a pair of rare, miniature white-faced heifers named after them." (For the record, Ben and Jen do indeed have a golden retriever named Martha Stewart, which is really stellar.) Unfortunately for Ben and Jen (and also for the cows, really), their names were not chosen in the end. Winning the naming competition by 2 percent were "Sir Loin and Madam Bovine." We're not going to guess at which celebrities are associated with those nicknames. —Jada Yuan

See Chris Rock, Mariah Carey, Robert Downey Jr., and others at our complete coverage of the Time 100 party.

What Shall I Name My New Hereford Cattle? [Martha Stewart]
Earlier: Martha Stewart Wants You to Name Her Cows

We were in a house-y mood last night. No wonder! We were in Chelsea at the opening night of Design on a Dime. It's a Real Simple–presented event benefiting Housing Works where you can walk through endless "rooms" done up by interior designers and then buy anything you want out of them at cut rates.

So, when we got to chat with the evening's host, Maggie Gyllenhaal, who recently bought a brownstone in Park Slope, we wanted to talk shelter with her. Did the rooms in her 'stone, where she lives with her toddler, Ramona, and baby daddy, actor Peter Sarsgaard, look as good as the ones at the benefit? "We're still really in the process of — so far, most of the design things that we've chosen are not actually furniture choices as much as tiles and fixtures and that kind of thing," she said, eating a mini-burger. (She'd been shooting a Marie Claire Batman cover all day, and girlfriend was tired and hungry.) "I kind of need to get another movie before I furnish it."

Spotting his shiny Time 100 lapel pin at the magazine's gala for their annual list on Thursday, we congratulated newsman Brian Williams on being named one of the world’s most influential people. “I’m an emeritus,” he said. “I’m already yesterday’s news, because I’m a former 100, noted by the black pin as opposed to the red lacquer,” he explained, exposing our ignorance of lapel-pin signifiers. On this year's list (and present at the party), were notables like Mariah Carey — who performed — Lorne Michaels, John McCain, Judd Apatow, Rupert Murdoch, and Robert Downey Jr. As a former Time 100 member, one must at least get to help choose the new ones, right? “We get absolutely no power with this thing as far as I can tell,” Williams told us. “No rights are transferred to me by dint of being named to the 100. I’ve tried it; it doesn’t get me out of a ticket — even though Ray Kelly is here, and was a member of my class; I still get dinged if I’m too close to a hydrant. And I’ll still be out there hailing a car service tonight at the end of it.” Williams thinks the least they could do is give former 100 inductees voting rights on the Time, Inc. board. “I think a system of superdelegates would be preferable, say, those of us on television,” he said. Wait, people who cover the election for TV think they should be superdelegates? We would have never guessed. —Bennett Marcus

See Chris Rock, Mariah Carey, John McCain, and others at our complete coverage of the Time 100 party.

So last night we went to the bar Angels & Kings because it is the hottest rock-and-roll bar in town it is two blocks from our house. They were holding their new "Angels and _______" party, which caters to a gay/mixed, preppy young crowd (not their usual customers, apparently). We were surprised, then, to see bar owner Pete Wentz sitting in the corner, with some of his friends from Gym Class Heroes and Panic at the Disco. Wentz is straight, like so straight people can't stop talking about how he may have knocked up Ashlee Simpson! Naturally, we accosted him. "I heard it's gay night, right?" he asked us, after we complimented his pointy hair. Turns out Pete has "great 'dar," by which he means he has a highly tuned interior electromagnetic sensor which lets him know when there are moving or fixed homosexuals nearby. So naturally we asked, Do you like running with gays, Pete? "It seems sometimes like nobody knows how to have a good time anymore," he told us. "But the gays are always having a good time." It's true! We are! We didn't get our name for being grouchy, now did we?

Related: Pete Wentz Designs and Wears Women's Clothes [Cut]

At last night's American Society of Magazine Editors' awards ceremony, it actually felt fitting when the editor of Backpacker magazine got more laughs than the three actors from 30 Rock — Katrina Bowden, Lonny Ross, and Judah Friedlander — who'd been dragged into service as presenters. ("This is a night celebrating magazine writers," someone commented after the ceremony. "Can't they find anyone decent to, you know, write the material?") Indeed, the other celebrity presenters, including Charlie Rose, Anderson Cooper (who sped through his lines like a man rushing to make his date with a tropical storm), and Padma Lakshmi (who may be the slowest speaker on earth), hardly seemed necessary. As the night progressed, it became exceedingly clear that magazine editors can handle their cynical barbs quite well without the help of fancy-pants television personalities.

The self-deprecation had begun almost immediately. As we walked into the room, one editor after another gloomily predicted that he would bring home no Ellies that night. "I know we're not going to win. We're a year-old magazine," said Radar 's Maer Roshan. "I know I will not have to go up there," chimed in Time's Rick Stengel. "I guarantee you that." For the record, they were both right.

It's a testament to Sean Avery's hard-hitting presence both on the ice and in New York's club scene that, after he was hospitalized Tuesday with a lacerated spleen from the Ranger's third-in-a-row loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins, Bungalow 8 owner Amy Sacco was mixed in with the teammates by his bedside. "I brought him a picture of me so he wouldn't miss me," Sacco said at last night's "Portraits & Polaroids" benefit auction at Phillips de Pury. "He's doing better, but it's a devastating loss for all of us to not have him finish the playoffs." As of this afternoon the Rangers forward remained in the intensive care unit at St. Vincent's Medical Center, although doctors say he won't require surgery. "He's a tough cookie," says Sacco, a inveterate hockey fan who says Avery is like "a little brother" to her. "He's already anxious to get back on the ice, so they're probably have to sedate him and cuff him to his bed until he gets better. He's ready to go back against the Penguins. That's my boy!" —Andrew Goldstein

L.A. resident Busy Philipps has an interesting impression of Brooklyn, the borough where her pal Michelle Williams and goddaughter Matilda Ledger live. “I found some people in Brooklyn to be very rude to me the last time I was there”, Philipps told us at the premiere of her new movie, Made of Honor, at the Ziegfeld last night. “I ended up on this Website called ‘Gawker,’ and they said that I was making out with someone, and it was right after I had gotten married. I was really upset about it, because I wasn’t.” It was last summer, after a Modest Mouse show at McCarren Pool, when Philipps hit the bars in Williamsburg, she told us. “But there was no making out with some dude.” Philipps let the Website know. “I had just gotten married, and to read that about yourself! It sucks, you know? Some girl was like, ‘Busy Philipps was a slut and made out with my ex-boyfriend.’ Now, I may have been a slut in the past, and I may have made out with her ex-boyfriend in the past, but I didn’t that night, so I wanted to set the record straight,” she said. This whole kerfuffle made a larger point about the lameness of Brooklyn, Philipps pointed out. “In Los Angeles there are, I guess, much bigger fish to fry, so I never get written about in anything, ever," she said. "But I got written up in some gossip thing in Brooklyn??” —Bennett Marcus