Walt Disney

TELEVISION 1.CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, CBS 2.Desperate Housewives, ABC 3.Without a Trace, CBS 4.Survivor: Guatemala, CBS 5.Grey's Anatomy, ABC FILMS 1.Chicken Little, Disney 2.Jarhead, Universal 3.Saw II, Lions Gate 4.The Legend of Zorro, Sony 5.Prime, Universal SINGLES 1.Gold Digger, Kanye West featuring Jamie Foxx 2.Run It!, Chris Brown 3.My Humps, Black Eyed Peas 4.Soul Survivor, Young Jeezy featuring Akon 5.Photograph, Nickelback ALBUMS 1.#1's, Destiny's Child 2.All the Right Reasons, Nickelback 3.Timeless, Martina McBride 4.Thanks for the Memory ... The Great American Songbook Vol. IV, Rod Stewart 5.Monkey Business, Black Eyed Peas DVDS (SALES)

To watch most of his favorite programs, James Finn doesn't turn on the TV. He boots up his computer. The 25-year-old manager of a Baltimore movie theater spends up to four hours a day on ManiaTV.com, checking out music videos, extreme sports highlights and short films streamed over the Internet. "I used to watch TV three or four hours a day," said Finn, who lives in Middle River. "Now I'm down to about two hours of TV a week." Five years ago, at the height of the dot-com boom, entrepreneurs and visionaries predicted that new online venues would overtake traditional media as viewers like Finn enjoyed shows and other content tailored to their tastes and schedules.

Thursday film screenings based on children's books The Carroll Arts Center will screen six films based on classic children's literature at 1 p.m. Thursdays in the theater at 91 W. Main St., Westminster. All tickets are $3. Scheduled movies are: Thursday: Swiss Family Robinson. This 1960 Walt Disney film is about a shipwrecked family that turns a desert island into a dream paradise complete with a three-story treehouse and a menagerie of tame animals. July 7: Old Yeller: Adventure and love are blended together in this 1957 Walt Disney story of a farm family in Texas and a stray dog that plays an unforgettable part in their lives.

Planes, trains and automobiles will deliver visitors to their vacation destinations this summer. For the U.S. leisure industry and investors in its stock, they can't arrive soon enough. Well-heeled baby boomers and bargain-hunting foreign tourists, it is hoped, soon will be filling hotels, cruise ships, casinos and auto-racing stands to capacity. The fly in the suntan lotion is the possibility that oil prices could spiral hopelessly out of control, calling off all bets. Nagging oil concerns have slowed leisure industry earnings this year.

BALTIMORE Aquarium to refurbish site of old city garage The National Aquarium in Baltimore has received a $200,000 federal grant to refurbish 12 acres and an old city garage along the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River to use for an animal-care and education center. Sens. Paul S. Sarbanes and Barbara A. Mikulski announced that the cleanup grant is part of the Brownfields Program, which promotes redevelopment of abandoned and contaminated waste sites. The land is the former site of the city's Central Maintenance Garage.

Disneyland turns 50 this year, and a new parade, a new fireworks show and new attractions will be part of its long party, which begins May 5. To get the most bucks for the bang, the celebration -- called "The Happiest Homecoming on Earth" -- will continue for 18 months at Disneyland and its sister parks, from Orlando to Paris and Tokyo -- and at the new Disneyland in Hong Kong, which opens in September. Arising among what were orange groves and walnut farms in Anaheim, near Los Angeles, Disneyland was the brainchild of Walt Disney and the first of what is now a theme-park empire on three continents.

BURBANK, Calif. - Walt Disney Co. directors tapped President Robert A. Iger yesterday to succeed Chief Executive Michael D. Eisner, writing the final chapter for an often stormy 21-year reign during which the company mushroomed from a moribund studio into a global entertainment giant. The selection ended a high-profile search for a new leader for the fabled company, which has been under siege by critics who wanted to hasten Eis- ner's departure. He will remain until Sept. 30, and then Iger will take the helm of a conglomerate that has more than 100,000 employees, a global theme park empire, a library of such classic films as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the ESPN sports broadcasting juggernaut, the ABC network and the cartoon character Mickey Mouse.

MINNEAPOLIS - A year after serving as the stage for an unprecedented outpouring of shareholder anger, Walt Disney Co.'s annual meeting yesterday was a veritable lovefest for chief executive Michael D. Eisner. Eisner was re-elected to Disney's board with only about 8 percent of the company's shareholders withholding their votes from him. Last year, Eisner was humbled when 45 percent of the company's shareholders withheld their votes and he was stripped of his chairman's position at the meeting in Philadelphia, which lasted five hours and attracted at least 2,700 shareholders.

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission dropped a claim against Walt Disney & Co. Chief Executive Officer Michael D. Eisner, freeing him from a settlement the company reached with the agency this week over disclosure violations, people familiar with the matter said yesterday. Eisner and the SEC staff had reached an accord in which he took blame for not telling investors the company had business ties to some directors, said the sources, who asked not to be named. The agreement didn't involve a fine and called for Eisner to refrain from violating securities laws, the sources said.

The networks should just get it over with and run preventive apologies as crawls under all their regular programs: "We are so sorry you just saw that/Please forgive our producer, he lost his head for a second/Gosh, I am such an idiot I could shoot myself." First CBS apologized for interrupting the ending of CSI: NY with a news bulletin that Yasser Arafat had died (that was unforgivable). Then ABC apologized for showing Nicollette Sheridan's bare back in a scripted skit introducing Monday Night Football.