From our friends over at GalleyCat:

Want to talk about books or make some literary friends in Los Angeles?

If you live in the Los Angeles area, we can help you answer all those questions. You should join us for our Cocktails in Los Angeles party at Whiskey Blue in the W Hotel on Tuesday, September 11, 2012 from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM (PDT).

Follow this link to RSVP. The party will be hosted by Write On Online‘s Debra Eckerling and GalleyCat editor Jason Boog. It is a great way to meet new friends, network with media professionals or tell this GalleyCat editor about your favorite book.

Who should play a young Dennis Hopper? That tantalizing question frames Mike Fleming‘s Deadline item about the launch of Ex Machina Media Group. The company’s first project will be Rebel in Paradise (My Life and Times of My Buddy Dennis Hopper), based on partner Della Manitou‘s friendship with the actor and book of the same name.

Several other bits of Hopper-related news recently caught FishbowlLA’s attention. In a Wednesday Q&A with The Guardian, architect Amanda Levete brought up his name when asked about the best advice she was ever given:

About four years ago, I sat next to Dennis Hopper at dinner. I’d just come back from Las Vegas, where we’d been commissioned to design an art gallery. I’d found it apocalyptic. When I told him so, he just said, “Relax, babe – if you can’t enjoy Vegas for a few days, there’s something wrong.” He was right: I was being far too uptight.

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Do you pay much attention to the Editors’ Picks section on the right-hand side of the Google News page? Although for many this widget is likely just a quick, passing blur on the way to inputting search terms, San Diego writing prof Bob Dorn still thinks it’s worth mentioning how selective the showcasing is.

After a week spent monitoring the site about two hours per day, he makes a somewhat porous argument in the San Diego Free Press. In the sense that like the Oscars, there are only so many slots to be filled, so inevitably many deserving publications will always be left out of the EP honor roll:

Why are so many of the nation’s very best newspapers seldom allowed into the coverage on the left side of the [Google News] page, and why do they never appear in the Editor’s Picks section?

That small prestigious group of the excluded is made up of organizations such as the Los Angeles Times, winner of 41 Pulitzer prizes (only the NYT and WashPost have won more), the Chicago Tribune and the Boston Globe, which since 1941 has won 20 Pulitzers. Esquire and Vanity Fair, two magazines that have produced devilishly daring investigations, and The New Yorker and Harper’s and The Nation don’t appear in Google News. The Atlantic, during the week appeared just once during my monitoring of the site.

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Big announcement this morning from Advertising Age digital editor Michael Learmonth. The Chicago-founded, New York based publication has added a San Francisco bureau chief, Cotton Delo.

She will be based out of the Crain’s newsroom in the Hearst Building and have a couple of weeks to get settled before the magazine’s Digital Conference in San Francisco September 20. Delo gets the bump just a year after starting out with Ad Age covering the social media beat:

As head of Ad Age‘s San Francisco bureau, Cotton will expand her coverage to Bay Area ad agencies, consumer-focused startups, ad tech and venture capital firms. She will, to put it in old-fashioned journalism terms, “follow the money,” which increasingly flows from the world’s biggest brands to tech platforms such as search, social and video to reach consumers. She’ll also cover the personalities creating change, so expect to see her at meetups, parties and events.

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Thursday at Dodger Stadium was Vin Scully bobblehead night, and the  broadcast legend was asked to throw out the first pitch.

You didn’t really expect the 84-year-old to throw out his arm by tossing from the mound, did you?

Rehearsals started this week in Studio City for Dish Nation, KTTV FOX 11′s mash-up of celebrity news. Following a limited 2011 test run, the program is scheduled to return to the airwaves September 10  at 12:30 p.m. /6:30 p.m weekdays in SoCal and at various other times on Fox stations across the country.

The interchangeable sets of featured radio show teams include DJ Laz and his KXOL 96.3 FM morning show sidekick Liliani Gonzalez. Both recently relocated to the west coast from Miami.

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Are you interested in things that are ‘hard, fast, and shiny?” If spaceships and supercars are your thing, you might think about pitching to Popular Science. This mag is freelancer-friendly (75 percent of its content is written by freelancers!) and is always looking for news from around the corner. After all, their motto is, “the future now.”

“The one central tenet of our magazine is that it’s a really relentlessly optimistic magazine,” said editor-in-chief Jacob Ward. “We believe that technology and science are gonna make the future better than it is today.” So, if you’ve got a scoop on the next innovation that will save us from the apocalypse, better pitch it before anyone else does.

Read more in How To Pitch: Popular Science. [Mediabistro AvantGuild subscription required]

A year ago at this time, Scott Feinberg (pictured) had just signed a contract with The Hollywood Reporter to join the publication as lead awards blogger and tumbled into his first-ever trip to Telluride. This weekend, he’s back in the picturesque Colorado mountains, ready to handicap 2012 Oscar hopefuls alongside a small group of LA journo regulars that includes Anne Thompson (Indiewire), Gregory Ellwood (Hit Fix), Steve Pond (TheWrap) and Pete Hammond (Deadline).

“It’s funny, the one place where we all end up is the Santa Barbara Film Festival,” Feinberg told FishbowlLA via telephone yesterday shortly after arriving in the rain. “It’s weird. Some of us can’t make it to Telluride, some of us can’t make it to Toronto. But the one that it just seems, year after year, all the usual LA Oscar beat writers end up at is Santa Barbara.”

Everything is walking distance in Telluride. It’s also a place where, with a very few exceptions, outlets pay the same hefty price for journalist passes as attendees. And because locals are used to living next to the likes of Ralph Lauren, Oprah Winfrey and Tom Cruise, the already secluded event has a welcome, casual feel for A-list attendees. Starting with today’s traditional kick-off picnic.

“At the end of last year’s awards season, George Clooney told me Telluride had been one of the highlights of the circuit, which he was on for a whole six months,” Feinberg recalled. “He felt that he could walk around here with no bodyguards, no entourage… Of course, one or two people might still ask him for photos. But it’s nothing like LA or Toronto.”

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A good comeback, but the Obama team has always been adept at social media. Clint Eastwood, on the other hand, doesn’t even appear to have a Twitter account. But the empty chair he scolded last night does:

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Clint Eastwood‘s surprise appearance last night at the Republican National Convention managed to upstage even Mitt Romney, but that wasn’t due to the iconic actor’s star power. Rather it was Eastwood’s long, rambling speech that stole the show, an episode so bizarre we’re almost reluctant to make fun of it.

For reasons unknown, Eastwood tossed aside a prepared speech and decided to ad-lib it. Bad idea. The veteran actor should know that improv is harder than it looks, and he isn’t exactly a graduate of The Groundlings. Though only scheduled for 5 minutes, Eastwood spoke for over 10, addressing an imaginary President Obama in an empty chair, whom he imagined to be hurling obscenities, and veering wildly from topic to topic without making much sense.

The Romney campaign responded to the disaster by saying, “You can’t look at him at through the same political lens that you would other politicians. He’s Clint Eastwood.”

Anyhow, watch and cringe.