With rainbow flags leading their path, Chicago Blackhawks Brent Sopel and the Stanley Cup had a gay ol' time this weekend ... at Chicago's Gay Pride festival on Sunday.

While it was the Stanley Cup's first appearance at a gay pride event, Sopel wanted to ride in the parade to honor Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brian Burke's son, Brendan, who was killed in a car accident just three months after publicly coming out of the closet.

Now the Stanley Cup plays on everyone's team.

Move over Modern Family and Hot in Cleveland, I've found new love in sitcom land. I've fallen head over heals for Fiona, a therapist played by Lisa Kudrow, in the improvised on-line series Web Therapy!

Lisa Kudrow stars as a therapist with limited patience for other people's problems in this original improvised Web series. Now in it's third season you can catch up on past episodes at Lstudio.com and tune in for new episodes every Wednesday.

Some things get better with age – wine for example, or a nicely worn leather jacket, and even a parade with millions of twinkling lights and synchronized music!

This month one of the most beloved attractions in Disney history, the Main Street Electrical Parade, returned to Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom Park and with it a flood of memories, emotions, tall tales and tremendous pride. The parade has had several extended runs at Walt Disney World starting with in 1972 just months after the opening of the Magic Kingdom.

One of my earliest childhood memories was visiting the Magic Kingdom, the weekend of the ELP parade’s debut. It is one of my earliest childhood memories – I was four years old. I remember the beautiful Blue Fairy leading the parade (as she still does today) and the Big Bass Drum pulled by the Casey Jr. Engine, the Cinderella float and canopy, a Chinese dragon float that marked the finale.

The first run of the parade lasted two summer seasons and ended in 1974. But overwhelming demand from fans and visitors harkened the parade’s return in 1977 for a 14 year run that ended in 1991. It was during the last three years of that run that a four year olds fascination became a young man’s dream as for three summers I performed in the parade and even got the opportunity to be a float driver.

I will never forget the faces on the people in the crowd as we marched carrying the Blue Fairy’s train or danced under those same canopys to recreate Cinderella’s ball. The music, the wonder – even the mishaps of two nightly parades and the millions of smiles that they created ranks among my most joyous life moments.

So these summers, after visits to Disney parks around the globe, the Main Street Electrical Parade returns home – and it’ll be better than ever. The classic parade will feature new LED lights and new audio technology during its limited engagement (please note the 1977 return was also billed as a limited engagement). Tinker Bell will lead the parade waving from the basket of a magical balloon aboard a new float. The parade’s return is part of Summer Nightastic! — an amazing lineup of new and enhanced entertainment planned this summer at Walt Disney World theme parks.

So if you have never experienced the parade or if you have viewed in hundreds of times – it’s time to be a four year old again! I can hear the music now!

(If you are checking out the parade on Friday, June 25 a special crowd will be joining you as hundreds of former ELP performers return to WDW to re-live the magic that is the Main Street Electrical Parade).

Usually the lazy pace of suburban life on a Sunday in about bagels and brunch, little league and lounging around by the pool, but today is different as many folks are waking up to a Show Tune Sunday!

The declaration of Show Tune Sunday doesn’t come simply because the theater community presents the 64th annual Tony Awards to Broadway’s best and brightest tonight in New York (actually the award’s official name is the Antoinette Perry Award). The declaration is also due in part to a resurgence of interest in musical theater spurred on by TV’s Glee and younger-skewing theater productions like The Lion King, Shrek and Rock of Ages.

The gay community has been celebrating Show Tune Sunday with movie and Broadway musical sing-a-longs and karaoke for years at places like Sidetracks in Chicago, Tribe in Nashville, and the Minneapolis Eagle. In bars across the country the gay community brings to life West Side Story, Evita (the Patti Lupone Broadway version, not the Madonna movie), and harkens back musical memories of Judy Garland and Fred Astaire.

Even folks still in the musical theater closet can get their musical fix on XM and Sirius Satellite radio 247 and show tunes are a Sunday staple on many Jazz and public radio stations across the country.

But the seismic awareness of Show Tune Sunday has been caused the last few years by teenagers and young professionals. The Show Tune explosion owes its start to the High School Musical and Camp Rock TV movies from Disney as well as the film versions of Chicago and Fame. They have given birth to the new generation of Broadway babies.

I’m not sure how long this new generation will flourish, but at least the often stodgy and uptight Broadway producer community has taken notice and has stoked the fires of the musical generation with new productions like American Idiot, the new musical based on the Green Day album of the same name. Not to mention pop culture referenced shows like Adams Family and Nine to Five as well as campy revivals of shows like Bye Bye Birdie and Grease. And Annie returns to the great white way in 2012!

So everyone grab a microphone or a hair brush today and give your suburban life your best Idina Menzel, or Neil Patrick Harris and sing a little Show Tune this Sunday! Everybody’s doing it!

It seems I moved from Nashville just in time to avoid a Situation at the 2010 CMT Music Awards. Or rather, The Situation.

Yup, groan/celebrate as you see fit: Jersey Shore stars Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino and Nicole "Snooki" Polizzi are among the newly added names set to appear at the awards show, which'll air live from the Bridgestone Arena at 7 p.m. on the country music network.

It's bad enough that the Awards are part of CMA Music Fest - the one week when Nashville becomes the polyester capital of the world - but add a healthy Jersey dose of hair spray and spray tan and Nashville may be even more toxic that the Gulf of Mexico. (And growing up in Jersey and living 15 years in Nashville makes me an expert on this toxic mix).

Other, arguably less controversial names joining the CMT Awards cast include Middle Tennessee pop star Sheryl Crow, actress Jada Pinkett-Smith and comedian David Spade, among others. Viewers will also catch appearances from some actual by-gosh country artists, including Faith Hill, Martina McBride, Blake Shelton, Taylor Swift, Gloriana, Kellie Pickler and Laura Bell Bundy.

Kid Rock will host the shindig, and perform.

From a doctor to a dentist - ER star John Stamos is in negotiations to join red-hot Fox musical dramedy Glee in a heavily recurring role next season. He will play a new love interest for lovable OCD guidance councelor Emma (Jayma Mays). In tonight's freshman season finale of Glee, Emma will tell on-and-off flame Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) that she is dating a dentist. That is the character that Stamos will play next season.

Stamos, repped by WME and Brillstein Entertainment, has a solid Broadway resume, which includes roles in Cabaret, Nine, How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying and, most recently, Bye Bye Birdie. In primetime, he most recently starred on NBC's ER, on which he played paramedic-turned-intern Tony Gates.

The Fox TV network announced Friday it has canceled the series 24. A victim of higher costs and declining ratings, 24 will end its run when the current eighth season concludes this spring.

I was a fan of 24 when it premiered in 2001. The series played an important role in the rebuilding of the Fox network, and was a groundbreaking drama in its early seasons. The unique "Day long" format was one of the shows major attractions and its greatest flaw. The format was highly unrealistic and recent seasons became repetitive in plot. There are only so many ways to thwart terrorist plots in one given day.

I still marvel how Jack Bauer gets so much talk time on his cell phone without recharging and how he can drive, jet, or otherwise transport hundreds of miles in mere moments - especially in Southern California traffic.

After the first season's DVD set was released - I even attempted to go 24 hours non-stop with Jack Bauer by watching the show's 24 episodes back-to-back. Unfortunately even with a ton of caffeine, I faded away after 18 hours - more of boredom than of exhaustion.

Star Keifer Sutherland says he's "really nostalgic and really sad" at the show's demise. But executive producer Howard Gordon says the cast and crew agreed the time was right, as the show's real-time format became limiting: "We've really had what feels like our last day."

The series will come to a more "definitive" end than in past seasons, Sutherland says, that makes it clear hero Jack Bauer can't continue in his role as CTU's action hero. The series wraps production on April 9 and will air its two-hour finale on May 24.

Now the cast and crew will turn their sights on a long-discussed feature film, which would send Sutherland's Jack Bauer to Europe for a story set in single day that avoids its current format, in which each episode represents a single hour.

Here is hoping that they don't plan on locking in movie goers for a full 24 hours!

BLAMESTORMING: Sitting around in a group, discussing why a deadline was missed or a project failed, and who was responsible.

SEAGULL MANAGER: A manager who flies in, makes a lot of noise, craps on everything, and then leaves.

ASSMOSIS: The process by which some people seem to absorb success and advancement by kissing up to the boss rather than working hard.

SALMON DAY: The experience of spending an entire day swimming upstream only to get screwed and die in the end.

CUBE FARM: An office filled with cubicles.

PRAIRIE DOGGING: When someone yells or drops something loudly in a cube farm, and people's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.

MOUSE POTATO: The on-line, wired generation's answer to the couch potato.

SITCOMs: Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage. What yuppies turn into when they have children and one of them stops working to stay home with the kids.

STRESS PUPPY: A person who seems to thrive on being stressed out and whiney.

SWIPEOUT: An ATM or credit card that has been rendered useless because the magnetic strip is worn away from extensive use.

XEROX SUBSIDY: Euphemism for swiping free photocopies from one's workplace.

IRRITAINMENT: Entertainment and media spectacles that are annoying but you find yourself unable to stop watching them. The O.J. trials were a prime example.

PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE: The fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it to work again.

ADMINISPHERE: The rarefied organizational layers beginning just above the rank and file. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

404: Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested document could not be located.

GENERICA: Features of the American landscape that are exactly the same no matter where one is, such as fast food joints, strip malls, subdivisions.

OHNOSECOND: That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake.

WOOFYS: Well Off Older Folks.

SALT LAKE CITY - Walter Fredrick Morrison, the man credited with inventing the Frisbee, has died. He was 90.

Utah House Rep. Kay McIff, an attorney who represented Morrison in a royalties case, says Morrison died at his home in Monroe, Utah, on Tuesday. McIff is from Richfield, Morrison's original hometown.

"That simple little toy has permeated every continent in every country, as many homes have Frisbees as any other device ever invented," McIff said. "How would you get through your youth without learning to throw a Frisbee?"
Morrison's son, Walt, told The Associated Press Thursday that "old age caught up" with his father and that he also had cancer.

"He was a nice guy. He helped a lot of people," Walt Morrison said. "He was an entrepreneur. He was always looking for something to do."

Morrison sold the production and manufacturing rights to his "Pluto Platter" in 1957. The plastic flying disc was later renamed the "Frisbee," with sales surpassing 200 million discs. It is now a staple at beaches and college campuses across the country and spawned sports like Frisbee golf and the team sport Ultimate.

An official disc golf course at Creekside Park in the Salt Lake City suburb of Holladay is named for Morrison.

Morrison co-wrote a book with Frisbee enthusiast and historian Phil Kennedy in 2001. Kennedy released a brief biography about Morrison on Thursday, wishing his late friend "smoooooth flights."

According to Kennedy, Morrison and his future wife, Lu, used to toss a tin cake pan on the beach in California. The idea grew as Morrison considered ways to make the cake pans fly better and after serving as a pilot in World War II, Morrison began manufacturing his flying discs in 1948.

He would hawk the discs at local fairs and eventually attracted Wham-O Manufacturing, the company that bought the rights to Morrison's plastic discs.
Kennedy says Wham-O adopted the name "Frisbee" because that's what college students in New England were calling the Pluto Platters. The name came from the Frisbie Pie Co., a local bakery whose empty tins were tossed like the soon-to-be Frisbee.

Walt Morrison said his father is survived by three children. The family is planning a service for Morrison's friends and relatives Saturday at the Cowboy Corral in Elsinore.

From the AP

The following article appeared in USA Today on Wednesday, February 10, 2010 and includes quotes from The Mindless Man. The full article can be found at http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlife/2010-02-10-1Asocialbacklash10_CV_N.htm

By Marco R. della Cava, USA TODAY

Facebook reports that it has 400 million active users worldwide. Make that 399,999,999. Laura LeNoir is done.

"I feel better, I feel lighter, I got my privacy back," says LeNoir, 42, an office manager at an educational software company inBirmingham, Ala., who logged off a few weeks ago. "People say, 'You'll be back.' But I read more, walk the dogs more. I'll be fine."

As the social networking train gathers momentum, some riders are getting off.
Their reasons run the gamut from being besieged by online "friends" who aren't really friends to lingering concerns over where their messages and photos might materialize. If there's a common theme to their exodus, it's the nagging sense that a time-sucking habit was taking the "real" out of life.

"When I first closed my Facebook account, I felt disconnected from the world and missed the constant updates," says Leanna Fry, 32, of Provo, Utah, who is teaching English in Erzurum,Turkey. She signed off after feeling harassed by strangers. "But I've discovered I don't have to know what hundreds of people are doing. Now I have more time for people who really matter in my life."

Even super-connected celebrities are bolting. Disney pop siren Miley Cyrus quit Twitter last fall, followed by British singer Lily Allen. Both women said the site was proving a distraction from their relationships. Allen signed off with "I am a neo-Luddite, goodbye."

That desire to unplug has made an unexpected success out of websites such as Web 2.0 Suicide Machine and Seppukoo (a play on the Japanese word for "suicide"), free sites that automate and turbocharge the otherwise laborious manual process of scrapping your online self.

Lucca, Italy-based Seppukoo helped 20,000 people erase themselves from Facebook after the site launched last fall. Two-month-old Web 2.0 Suicide Machine - where a noose dangles near a ticker tracking the digital mayhem ("181,898 friends have been unfriended, 329,908 tweets removed") - has been used by 2,600 people. Thousands more are waiting to be accommodated by the site's small server, says Walter Langelaar, 32, one of three programmers who created the "art project" for Moddr, a media lab in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

"We are not anti-social-networking," says Langelaar, noting that the program was conceived for a party the lab threw a year ago to encourage face-to-face interaction. "We do, however, feel things are getting so messy in that world that (the sites) just get in the way of people living their lives."

Facebook is not amused. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company has blocked the servers of both sites and sent cease-and-desist letters stating that they violate Facebook's statement of rights and responsibilities policies by collecting user login data.

"Facebook provides the ability for (users) to use the site to deactivate their account or delete it completely," says Facebook spokesman Simon Axten.
Langelaar says Moddr has circumvented the block and counters: "We're not collecting login information; users bring their (data) to us. We are thinking of hiring our own lawyers."

Seppukoo, however, is now lifeless. "We have postponed any decisions until after our next Anti Social NotWorking art project comes out in the next weeks" is the cryptic comment from Guy McMusker of Les Liens Invisibles, a consortium of Web-focused artists responsible for the program.

Although Twitter is among the sites that programs such as Seppukoo can scour, the San Francisco-based micro-blogging venture has "no issues with people who want to leave," says spokesman Seth Garrett. "Our research shows that quite often they come back later."

Even tens of thousands of dropouts represent a fallen leaf in the forest of social networkers happily updating their status/thoughts/whereabouts at this very moment.

Facebook dominates that landscape, according to The Nielsen Co. It drew more than 110 million unique visitors in the USA in December, double its 2008 numbers. MySpace was second with nearly 60 million, a 17% drop from the previous year. Twitter pulled in nearly 20 million, and sites such as Classmates and LinkedIn had about 10 million.

Youth still rules in this domain. About 65% of kids 12 to 17 (and 37% of adults ages 18 and up) use a social networking site, according to the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. "For many, the time and energy spent putting content up means it's hard to leave," says Amanda Lenhart, Pew senior research specialist.

That said, the 24/7 tech addiction is causing even diehard social site fans to set limits, says Genevieve Bell, a cultural anthropologist with Intel. In a recent survey on mobile-device etiquette, Bell found that 69% said checking e-mail and sending texts in the company of others was unacceptable.

"This always-on lifestyle is being pushed as desirable, (but) there's a deeply rooted human need to have downtime," says Bell, director of user experience at Intel's Digital Home Group. "Perhaps tuning out of social networking is just a way of recalibrating that need for downtime."

Her recent interviews with users reveal that for some the ideal vacation spot is one without Web access. "We're starting to ask, how does all of this (technology) truly fit into our lives?" she says.

'Push back from this tide of technology'

One antidote to the always-on life is Freedom, free software that disables any Apple computer's Internet access for up to eight hours. About 100,000 Web users have downloaded Freedom since 2008, says Fred Stutzman, a graduate student in information sciences at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the program's creator.

"Freedom is a statement that it's OK to push back from this tide of technology and find some space to really think," he says.

People tuning out temporarily eventually could spell trouble for networking sites such as Facebook, says Danah Boyd, social media scholar at Microsoft Research in Boston. "A huge number of early adopters joined Facebook because they felt as though they had to, not because they were passionate about the site," she says.

Boyd cites the early networking site Friendster, which many users ditched for newcomer MySpace. "When the passion was lost, the group walked away. The folks who disengage from Facebook may not be vocal," but they're not to be ignored.

Another frequent user complaint: the barbarians at your virtual gates.
"With social media, there can be this critical moment where strangers take over," says James Fowler, co-author of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. "Twitter could face such a danger, because it's this enormous spam machine now."

Mark Dockendorff, 30, an investment adviser in Cincinnati, initially liked the way sites "let you get to know people through their pages, which is so much easier than talking in a bar. But now a lot of my friends are putting their pages on the back burner and just not updating."

As is Dockendorff, who was put off by his mom friending his ex-girlfriend. "Awkward," he says.

A move to Beijing led Larissa Paschyn to leave Facebook when the site was blocked by the Chinese government. Now this "avid user" feels liberated.
"There are many other ways to meet new people and truly experience life," says Paschyn, 24, a television host for CCTV International.

She also has a confession. One of her Facebook guilty pleasures was "checking up on people who were mean to me in school so I could gloat about my life," she says. Being off social sites has "made me a better person and less self-centered."

'It was consuming my life'

When Julian Smith grew frustrated with Facebook, he got silly. His video 25 Things I Hate About Facebook, which has 1.3 million views on YouTube, shows him being literally poked by a friend (No. 2) and lamenting ads for hot singles (No. 21).

"It's the way people are using social networking sites that's lame," says Smith, 22, a Los Angeles-based filmmaker. "Sure, it's a great way for me to let people know if I have a new film clip out. But to socialize with friends? Don't think so."
Dustin Blythe was initially elated when he joined Facebook. Then the snowball grew.

"I felt compelled to update my page every hour or so, even if there really was nothing new to write or show," says Blythe, 35, who registers voters in Mishawaka, Ind. "It was like (the sci-fi movie) Logan's Run, trapped in a society I couldn't get out of."

So he went cold turkey. Blythe now blogs instead, updating friends and family on his own timetable. "I have no regrets," he says. "Now I can post what's on my mind without the perceived pressure of keeping up with the Joneses and their BlackBerrys."

Getting off Facebook was tough for Roger Williams, whose love of technology earned him the nickname "Chaplain Geek" at St. Joseph's Medical Center in Stockton, Calif., where he's a grief counselor. But his New Year's resolution was to take a break from social networking.

"I liked that I could reconnect with friends from 30 years ago, but that soon turned into all sorts of people contacting me who I really didn't want to hear from," says Williams, 52, whose alma maters and friends-with-causes hit him up for donations. "I was getting hammered for money. I thought, 'Hey, I'm not a commercial entity.' I felt used."

Another frequent complaint from social networkers is that the variety of sites is overwhelming. Joe Ross recently used Web 2.0 Suicide Machine to wipe out his existence on MySpace, because he felt the site was getting too commercial.

"It was very cool to watch," says Ross, 26, a law student who works for the Philadelphia Housing Authority. But don't write him off the scene yet.

"I'm still on Facebook, and I'm a heavy Twitter user and blogger," he says. "Most of the people I'm friends with are people I wouldn't know if it weren't for social networking."

Ah, that word again. Friends.

Jim Hennessey was an avid social networker, using MySpace and Facebook for social updates, LinkedIn for work contacts, not to mention Meebo, Geni, Jiibe, Flickr and others.

The result? "I was so busy updating my various sites that there wasn't a social desire left in my body," says Hennessy, 42, a marketing consultant from Nashville. "It was getting impersonal."

So much so that when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma last year, Hennessey didn't get much support from his online community beyond a few messages. "I knew a lot of people (online), but it was a false sense of comfort," he says.

Though not willing to commit social networking suicide just yet, Hennessey, his cancer in remission, is now more circumspect about its powers and promises. And hungry for the human touch.

"A while back I met up with someone I got to know on Facebook, which was nice," he says. "But when she introduced me, she said, 'This is my friend Jim from Facebook,' as if it were a place.

"I just want to be Jim from Nashville."

Here are some of the best commercial spots from the 2010 Super Bowl. What were your favorites? Comment below.