(The first being Kurt Vonnegut.)

I loved Madeleine L'Engle's books, especially "A Wrinkle in Time" and "The Young Unicorns," and read them avidly as a kid. Count me as another girl who was encouraged to take science and math classes by her stories! Did she ever realize her influence on a generation of girls who were viewed as misfits for liking "guy stuff" like physics?

So I'll read these books once more, in memory of Madeleine L'Engle. While her novels are read and loved she will never truly have perished. And when my kids complain that they have nothing to do, I'll hand them my copy of "A Wrinkle in Time."

Regardless of energy efficiency. If you don't do your homework and research models and brands before buying something, you have a good chance of getting stuck with a lemon, or at the very least a model with features you don't like.

Also, I try never to buy a first-generation model of anything, whether it's energy-efficient appliances, cars, flat-screen TVs, computers, cell phones, or whatever. Yeah, I lose out on the "cool" factor by waiting ... but the next version will have more of the bugs worked out and is usually cheaper. (Look at all of the early adopters who got smoked on the iPhone!)

As for high-efficiency appliances always being worse than regular ones, that's hogwash. My high efficiency AC works very well, as do my EnergyStar computer monitors and refrigerator and my water-saving toilets. I don't have to flush twice, either, and my water bill's gone down since I got them.

I am hanging on to my old, inefficient dishwasher, washing machine and dryer until they give up the ghost, though. But that's just because I'm a cheapskate who hates to trash perfectly good appliances.

It's hard to find a good, supportive, comfortable bra of any type when you're well-endowed -- let alone a sports bra!

Title IX carries an extensive line of sports bras in a wide range of sizes. I know women of all shapes who swear by them. (However, Title IX is schizoid about their sportswear and clothing lines: their size range is extremely limited and offers almost nothing for petites, talls, and women above size L or 12/14.)

I've gotten recommendations for Champion sports bras from several large-breasted women. They are very supportive and reasonably priced as sports bras go.

Like your husband, my older son is tall and skinny and takes 30x32 or 30x34 pants. I can confirm that they are nearly as hard to find as supportive sports bras in large cup sizes. And I ran into the youth-to-men's shoe black hole with both of my boys. They outgrew size 6 youth shoes and needed a men's 7 or 7 1/2, but men's shoes below a size 8 were mighty scarce in stores. (This is NOT true for girls moving to women's shoes, BTW.) This gap mystifies me since virtually every boy eventually outgrows youth shoe sizes and has to move up to something!

As for the occasional Broadsheet article on bras, swimwear or clothing ... if you find these pieces to be trivial and frivolous, SKIP THEM! There are plenty of other things to read and comment on in Salon.

Meanwhile, I'm going to check out some of the recommendations for sports bras and exercise clothes. Thanks for all the tips, everyone!

If we'd have acted this lame during WWII, the free world would have fallen to the Nazis. Certainly Islamic terrorists are dangerous and need to be taken seriously, but they don't present the same kind of existential threat to America's existence that Nazi Germany -- or, for that matter, the USSR (which had the capability to destroy all human life on the planet) -- did. (And while we're on the subject of totalitarian dictators, substitute the word "Jew" or "bourgeois enemy of the people" for "Muslim" in their diatribes and tell me who it sounds like.)

I'd say that the biggest existential threat we face is not posed by Islamists at all -- it's posed by the Bush Administration and its enablers like Kirchick, Coulter, and their fellow travelers, who are destroying our freedoms and society from within. The terrorists won't have to lift a finger to destroy America because our power-mad leaders, corrupt neocon fifth columnists, and their sissy wannabe torturer mouthpieces will have done it for them. Heck of a job!

While I think it's a good movie, it's a pretty transparent call to "stay the course" no matter what the war's cost is on the home front. It also was made in the middle of the war, when it was still in doubt whether the Allies would ultimately win. Best Years of Our Lives is more of a retrospective and the sucessful end of the war (from the Allies standpoint, anyhow) gave a whole different context and meaning to the characters' sacrifices.

The current slate of Iraq war movies are hardly government propaganda, and I doubt any will have the message of Mrs. Miniver. But it's true that a bit of mental and temporal distance from the war will provide a different artistic and political perspective for filmmakers (not to mention novelists, musicians, visual artists, etc.). It's been this way in every cataclysmic event, that you cannot encompass it when you are in the midst of it.

If you enjoy having a TV in your house and want to make sure it has an innocuous effect on your kids, this book's advice seems sensible. Limit TV watching, don't leave the TV on in the background, be careful about the shows your kids watch, watch TV with them and discuss what's going on, and avoid shows with lots of commercials for fatty and sugary food. That doesn't sound horrible to me.