NOT HOSTED BY RUSSELL BRAND: The big Emmys (NPH! A live superstar band! A Shaiman/Wittman song for NPH!) aren't for another week, but the technical ones are being handed out right now, and results are here. A few things of interest.

• Pushing Daisies gets a well-deserved award in art direction (for the Chinese restaurant episode, which also wins for makeup), and it also picks up a costumes award (for the honey/bees episode).
  
• Casting in a comedy series goes as expected to 30 Rock, but drama sees a rather inexplicable win for True Blood over Mad Men, Damages, The Tudors, and FNL.
• The four SYTYCD and one DWTS nominees apparently split votes all over the place, so best choreography goes to the Jackman/Efron/Hudgens "Musicals Are Back!" number from the Oscars.
• Two of the four guest actor awards have been announced, and SNL has won an acting award for the first time since Dana Carvey won in 1993 for Justin Timberlake. ETA--make that two--Comedy guest actors go to Timberlake and Fey for SNL, and drama to Michael J. Fox for Rescue Me and Ellen Burstyn for playing Mama Stabler on SVU
  
• United States of Tara wins the award for its opening credits.
• Heroes for visual effects? Over the Fringe pilot and the BSG finale? Really?
• Chuck wins an Emmy! Admittedly, for stunts, but, still, it's an EMMY!
• ETA--Yes, Dr. Horrible can add "Emmy-winning" to its resume!

ETA--Dr. Horrible co-writer and performer Maurissa Tancharoen is tweeting up a storm from the show, with multiple pics.

TEENAGE ANGST HAS PAID OFF WELL, OR "XBOX-FRIENDLY UNIT SHIFTER": A brouhaha minicap: Courtney Love is pissed that Activision's Guitar Hero 5 not only puts Kurt Cobain into the uncanny valley but also lets him do this:

Except, um, she apparently signed the license letting Activision do it and Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic want and have nothing to do with it, urging Activision to re-lock the feature. ("It's hard to watch an image of Kurt pantomiming other artists' music alongside cartoon characters. Kurt Cobain wrote songs that hold a lot of meaning to people all over the world. We feel he deserves better.")

The moral of the story, of course, is to hire good IP lawyers. It's Courtney Love's moral and legal responsibility to protect her late husband's legacy and image, not Activision's. One wonders, by the way, how the Cash family feels.

[One also wonders, on the eve of another VMAs (should we liveblog?), whether Krist would license the rights to reproduce this moment of his.]

WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF I SANG OUT OF TUNE? I'D TURN ON NO FAIL MODE: Having now spent a fair amount of time with The Beatles: Rock Band, it's a great package, even for someone who's not hard-core into the Beatles, but I'm wondering if it's actually going to have the opposite effect to what is hoped. Because of the nature of the Beatles' music, there's not a lot of elaborate guitar work involved in many of the songs--the brilliance of the Beatles wasn't face-melting guitar solos or fanatic drumming, but a simple melody and the combination of all the elements. I'm easily scoring in the 90's on medium guitar on my first try, even on songs I'm less familiar with. The vocals are harder, and I haven't tried drumming yet. In contrast, I routinely failed songs in Guitar Hero and regular Rock Band when I first played them. I'm wondering if some folks for whom this is the first (or at least an early) exposure to the music of the Beatles to discount their musical achievement because it's not "Through The Fire and Flames," rather than getting a full understand of the band's historical and musical import.

DEPARTMENT OF DOING MY JOB FOR ME DEPARTMENT: Slate slags Runway! Has it really been this bad?

It was disappointing when the cute incompetent outlasted the two eccentrics. Eight seconds of the Klum Modeling School spin-off were enough to tell me that even if it turned out to be a worthy look inside the models' end of the industry it would not be sufficiently captivating. I have no feelings about swapping the network responsible for Real Housewives out for the network responsible for Wife Swap, except that the latter is not available in HD here. So, is the magic gone?

What have you all got?

THROUGH EARLY MORNING FOG I SEE VISIONS OF THE THINGS TO BE, REDUX: Famed comedy writer, screenwriter and playwright Larry Gelbart has died. He was 81. Gelbart, who led a varied and storied career, is of course best known for somewhat successfully adapting Robert Altman's M*A*S*H for TV. Quoted in his obit, Gelbart had this to say about the TV's show's unique tone:

"The thing that most appealed to me about 'MASH' was not even the movie. It was the theme song ['Suicide is Painless' written by Johnny Mandel and Mike Altman], the movie music, which was written in a very minor key and appealed to me emotionally. And I know that I pegged all that comedy to that sound."

Among Gelbart's other credits were the screenplay to Tootsie, the book for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and numerous jokes as a staff writer on Caesar's Hour Your Show of Shows alongside Mel Brooks and Neil Simon.

PLEASE DO STOP THE MUSIC: Y'know, Lea Michele's "Take A Bow" on Glee wasn't the only reinvention of a Rihanna song this week. Far more emotionally scarring is Charo (yes, that Charo) taking a crack at "Don't Stop The Music" as part of the Jerry Lewis MDA telethon, including Charo grinding on Jerry Lewis. One can only imagine what Joel McHale will have to say about this tonight. (HT: Jezebel).

THE MISSION, THE PLAN, JUST BREATHE, YOU DON'T HAVE TO UNDERSTAND: Random thought induced by both my current obsession with the BSG DVDs and my choice of workout music yesterday: Does it strike anybody else that The Thermals' The Body, The Blood, The Machine is the perfect soundtrack for Battlestar Galactica, tonally, thematically, titularly, and sometimes literally? I suppose it's inevitable that an album uses the story of Noah's Ark to depict a flight from fascist oppressors would share some content with BSG, but sometimes it's uncanny.