I bit my lip. “I know, Aunt Sue.”

“Oh.” She paused a moment, as if her brain was struggling really hard to make those connections. Finally she shrugged. “Well, maybe I’ll make lasagna tomorrow.”

I put the pan of meatloaf mush in the sink. “Well, I’ve been warned.”

Aunt Sue gave me a playful swat on the arm as I brushed past, stopping to deposit another quick kiss on her little old forehead, before scooting off to my room.

Once there, I kicked off my shoes, sat cross-legged on my patchwork bedspread, and booted up my laptop, going through my nightly ritual of checking various email accounts, Twitter posts, and celebrity watcher blogs for any hot leads to pad tomorrow’s column. Thanks to a carefully cultivated network of informants, I had eyes all over Hollywood.

A couple baby-bump sightings on Melrose, a fender bender in Malibu involving a judge from American Idol, and one from a guy who worked at Dunkin’ Donuts in Santa Monica who swore a certain bulimic actress was in buying glazed old-fashioneds like they were going out of style.

Envisioning tomorrow’s headline, GOLDEN GLOBE WINNER GORGES ON GLAZED GOODIES, I opened a Word doc and started snarking away.

I was halfway through tomorrow’s masterpiece when an instant message popped up in the corner of my screen. From ManInBlack72.

A quick jump of adrenaline hit my stomach, and I bit my lip to keep the corner of my mouth from curving into a smile.

Like most of Hollywood, I have my own dirty little secret: an online crush.

When Felix took over as managing editor, he was appalled by the paper’s lack of “digital exploitation,” as he put it. Personally, I figure a paper should be on paper, but Felix was more of a computer whiz than I, and his first steps were to put everything online—an interactive Informer webpage, daily tweets, blogs, and Facebook and MySpace accounts for all the staff.

ManInBlack72 first contacted me through my new MySpace account this past summer. He was a friend of a friend of a friend…Well, you know the drill. How does anyone know anyone online, but suddenly you’ve got five hundred friends, right? And one of them was him. He put a pic of that cartoon robot, Bender, from Futurama in my comments section. You know, for Tina Bender. Ha, ha. Pretty cheesy. And I told him so. Surprisingly, he had a sense of humor about it and sent me a cartoon with a wedge of Swiss cheese in it the next week. Pretty soon comments turned into private messages, which turned into emails, which turned into giving out our IM handles.

Which turned into me suppressing a smile as I clicked the “accept message” button.

Hey, Bender.

I quickly typed back. Hey.

How was your day, babe?