First Joaquin Phoenix, and now this: Kal Penn, the 31-year-old actor best known for his roles in the Harold and Kumar films and the TV series House, has taken what we hope will be a temporary retirement from acting to take a position as President Obama's associate director in the White House office of public liaison, which he describes as an outreach position in what is "basically the front door of the White House." A native of Montclair, New Jersey, the actor was born Kalpen Modi to Indian immigrants in 1977. (He uses the name "Kal Penn" professionally; according to Penn, he originally put the "Americanized" version of his name on his acting resume as an experiment to prove that it wouldn't make a difference to casting directors, then stuck with it when his callbacks instantly rose by fifty percent.) Although the official announcement of Penn's appointment wasn't made until yesterday, savvy House fans first sussed out that something was up on Monday night, when they tuned in to the latest episode and learned that Penn's character, Dr. Lawrence Kutner, had unceremoniously shot himself in the temple. It was a shocking tragedy, not least for special guest sick people Meat Loaf Aday and Colleen Camp, whose storyline had to be awkwardly sandwiched in between extended fits of grieving. It was only the next morning, when Penn broke the story to Entertainment Weekly, that it became clear that TV Land's loss was the White House's gain.

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Scarlett Johansson and Ryan Reynolds are getting hitched, and we here at the Screengrab haven't been this proud and excited since our guppies mated! These are two of our favorite people: Reynolds, because he's a likable fellow who's shown himself to be a reliable, capable actor whether he's flexing his chops in bad comedies (Van Wilder), bad action movies (Smokin' Aces), bad horror movies (The Amityville Horror), or bad unintentionally comic action horror movies (Blade : Trinity); Johansson, because she was once in a good movie (Ghost World) without doing it much harm, because Tom Waits isn't too proud to cash the royalty checks, and because every time we run a picture of her, such as this computer-generated simulation of what she'll look like in her wedding outfit, our page numbers go up for some reason. (Also, her name is Scarlett, but she's a blonde! How trippy is that!?) Interestingly, though both of them keep very busy, the 23-year-old Johansson and the 31-year-old cradle-robbing bastard Reynolds have never worked together before. (IMDB lists their only shared credit as 101 Sexiest Celebrity Bodies on TV, which we haven't seen--we're waiting for the opera---but we have a hunch it would stretch the definition of "working together.") But if this marriage is going to work, and I think we can all agree that the thought of it failing is just too morbid to contemplate, then they're going to want to explore the possibility of co-starring vehicles to increase their volume of quality time together. (It worked for Julia and Kiefer, right?) Because the kids must have their hands full with wedding plans--registering at Sears, negotiating to rent out a bowling alley for the bachelor party, trying to get Survivor's Boston Robb on the phone to ask if he'd still lobby for the surf and turf buffet--they might not have a lot of time to flip through scripts, so we've taken the liberty of offering a few suggestions:

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