Even without going to the stunt casting well, last night's How I Met Your Mother managed to rate. Take a gander at the throwback tag that reunited Neil Patrick Harris with the giant-cursored royal blue diary screen and plonky soundtrack that made him famous in the first place. After an episode in which Harris' Barney revisits all the schemes he's employed to get women into bed, he thoughtfully types the evening's lesson:

Sesame Street Shoe Fairy and part-time unicorn jockey Neil Patrick Harris was cornered by ET recently, who demanded from the How I Met Your Mother star the inside scoop on news that Britney Spears would be making her primetime TV comeback on the CBS sitcom. Responding with all the expert assuredness of an extremely well-read bathroom-literature junkie, Harris expressed "shock that Mme. Spears" was feeling up to the rigors of a role unlike any she has tackled before (she plays a secretary). He then goes on to advance a fascinating theory:

Attached, the intro to a recent story on Anderson Cooper 360 about the hate-motivated murder of an openly gay teenager. You may also recall that last month, Cooper was nominated for an award from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation for a story he did on the plight of homeless gay teens. The difficulties and discrimination faced by gay youths is clearly a subject that Cooper feels strongly about, and his dedication to fighting it is to be admired (and not, as we maybe occasionally are guilty of, mocked). So some might ask why Cooper himself still isn't public about his own sexual orientation, which might lead to him becoming a role model to the millions of young people struggling with discrimination who don't read Gawker. But Cooper might be on his way out of the closet! Sort of!

It's tough out there for Neil Patrick Harris. First, the evil geniuses behind Harold & Kumar force him to film scenes atop a sparkly unicorn. Now, those nefarious producers at PBS have cast him on Sesame Street as a character called The Shoe Fairy. After telling Conan's audience that he "loves puppets!" and misunderstanding their muffled laughs, Harris goes on to give us a sample of what those sneaky writers put in his script:

As we all know by now, Harold and Kumar 2 features Neil Patrick Harris on a unicorn, a decision equivalent to the producers reaching into our wallet personally and removing the 11 dollars from its musty confines. Revealing some details of the not-particularly-closely-guarded plot to nymag.com, Harris says: "It's the very next day, so I'm still the same Neil Patrick Harris you saw before. I have not attempted rehab. I might have gone on another bender since you've seen me. Maybe not on the same drug. Maybe a new drug." Asked about the unicorn, he added, "It was a little hard.... I had to ride it without a saddle, and it was in a green-screen room, and I had to ride it up a ramp and turn around. And this unicorn is very unfamiliar with a crew and green screen, and you don't have a saddle to hold on to. So there was lots of calming, nurturing touches.... It was very Horse Whisperer-y." Towleroad already burned the barebacking joke, so we'll just leave you with a wish of being greeted tonight by NPH-on-a-unicorn dreams. [nymag.com]

Hey, Neil Patrick Harris on unicorns! Talking to us! [haroldandkumar]

Homosexual man actually capable of portraying straight man in television show; is recognized by trade awards group for acting ability, gayness. [LAT]

Neil Patrick Harris appeared on Ellen today, the platform of choice for recently self-outed TV stars looking to get something gay-related off their chests. He explained how his pronouncement came directly out of his desire to circumvent a gathering "witch-hunt" after a gossip item about he and his boyfriend led to a huffy denial from a publicist that he was "not of that persuasion." From the People.com report:

· Neil Patrick "other out gay actor on a network TV series" Harris, who recently stood alongside noted pink F-bomb detonator Isaiah Washington while announcing the People's Choice Award nominations sans gay-slur incident, weighed in with his thoughts on the matter: "I was just sort of stunned that anyone would want to rehash any of that again. But I think the people, the classier people, handled it as they always do." In case you're still in the dark, "classy" is the new code for famous gays and their best friend co-stars who offer to beat up their homophobic tormentors on their behalf. [People]
· Ellen DeGeneres focused on the word itself, telling Extra: "This particular word is thrown around all the time at the workplace, at the playground, on the sports field and no one gets outraged. Hopefully this incident will put an end to this and people will stop using this word and other hateful words once and for all." Let's hope the insanity stops here, and that Jorja Fox isn't forced to drop by Ellen to tearfully recount the time Gil Grissom called her a "greedy rugmuncher" upon discovering she ate the last craft service banana. [Extra]
· John Mayer addresses the controversy on his blog today, suggesting the most poetically just penance would be for Washington's Grey's Anatomy character Dr. Preston Burke to "come out to his friends and colleagues as a gay man!!!" (Extra-squealy triple exclamation marks his.) He then proceeds to script how that scene might play out, for what feels like an uncomfortably long, not particularly funny, length of time. [JohnMayer via Towleroad]

We know how you all are crazy for show tunes, especially when they come from Les Miserables. Here's a stunning rendition of that show's "Confrontation" performed by How I Met Your Mother's Doogie Howser and some other dude. This occurred earlier in the week on The Megan Mullally Show, which apparently has not yet been cancelled. Anyway, enjoy.

PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, which we try to post several times per week, so send them in as quickly and as often as you can. Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line) and let the world know about the time you spotted Jake Gyllenhaal render a volunteer incontinent at your local polling station.

Reichen Lehmkuhl, the Amazing Race winner and aspiring actor who managed to hush all the naysayers with his laudable, recent turn on Days of Our Lives as a bartending amateur detective hot on the trail of a missing cellphone, is once again making self-induced headlines with comments he made regarding the recent coming out of How I Met Your Mother's Neil Patrick Harris—coining a new word in the process:

With Neil Patrick Harris' recent, matter-of-fact declaration of his own gayhood, and the similar celebrity announcements that preceded it, we could very well be entering a Golden Age of Hollywood Gays, where Best Actor winners won't think twice before gushingly thanking their partners at the podium, as opposed to surreptitiously squeezing their names between a rattled off list of agents and managers. In honor of this new time of openness, exciting to just about everyone save for the legions of publicists who have devoted the better parts of their careers to honing perfectly crafted deflections of the painfully obvious, WCBSTV.com (the people who previously gave Scientologists the same flipbook treatment) has amassed every remotely famous out person in history into one exhaustive slideshow entitled, "It's In To Be Out: Openly Gay Celebrities." It's a handy reference to bookmark, useful for everyone from fledgling anti-gay militias looking to debrief new recruits, to fans of Frasier who just needed a quick memory jog to help them recall which cast member actually came out of the closet.

• Kevin Federline gets mocked to his face at his own album release party and fails to notice. Do you ever feel kind of jealous of really stupid people? Like, nothing can hurt them. [cityrag]
  

With our minds already wrapped around the sweet, salty release of half-price Cadillac margaritas, we very nearly let this little tidbit get by us: Like the fat girl in high school you could always confide in, People magazine is once again the go-to source for young Hollywood actors looking to come out of the closet:

Towleroad notes the alleged "inning" of Neil Patrick Harris by his publicist, an incident which began with an item on Canada.com that claimed the actor had pulled strings to get "longtime sweetheart" David Burtka a role on How I Met Your Mother, then was followed by a report on ContactMusic.com ("A grain of salt free with every suspiciously underattributed celebrity news item!" ) which stated that the actor's "publicist, Craig Snyder" (actual name: Craig Schneider, according to StudioSystem) had countered the story by saying, "He's not of that persuasion." Now that the statement's out there, it shouldn't be long before we get a more definitive proclamation on the matter from the flack, who can always distance himself from his remark on the original Canada.com item by clarifying that the words "not of that persuasion," were referring to Harris being Canadian, not gay—a subtle but crucial difference.

"Dear PDA Diary: After a long, hard day, there's something calming and relaxing about getting on a downtown B train on the Upper West Side, clearing your head, and thinking about life. Especially when you're wearing a fabulous scarf and have a cute homo friend on each side. Still, I miss Vinnie."