Check out the British film "An Education" for a great movie about a WOMAN'S coming of age story (for a change). Also, there are plenty of current French films with female protagonists -- "8 Women," "Swimming Pool," "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not," to name a few. I realize these don't show up in multiplexes ("An Education" is currently in limited release in NY, LA, San Francisco, etc.) but there's always DVD.

I personally thought "Whip It" was a lot of fun but "Amelia" looks like a snooze -- and I'm usually a sucker for biopics.

First of all, I can't believe anyone recommending books without "dead, brutalized women" would dare suggest Stieg Larsson's "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," which had such horrifying scenes of rape and torture and murder that even this veteran crime fiction reader was shocked. Interesting to note that the original title of the book (in the original Swedish) was "Men who Hate Women."

I just finished yesterday Val McDermid's "A Darker Domain," which features a female detective in Scotland solving two cold cases. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for an absorbing thriller that doesn't fetishize violence against women. I also agree about Paretsky, and it's probably not a surprise that both she and McDermid are committed feminists.

I can tell you exactly when "The Simpsons" went from brilliant to mediocre: the 1993 episode Homer Goes To College, when the focus of the show became "Homer is an idiot."

Having said that, I do find a few decent episodes every season and am not terribly proud of the fact that I have seen pretty much every single episode. What can I say -- it's a habit.

In this post, researcher Berit Heitmann is referred to as "he." In fact, Berit is a woman's name and Heitmann is, in fact, female.

How about Sarsgaard's peter in "Kinsey," or William Hurt's memorable silhouette in "Broadcast News"?

...but it's been going on in general nonfiction for a long time now. A couple examples: A book called "Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World" came out over 10 years ago; "Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World" a bit more recently.

There's a mistake in this article: on pg. 1 the author writes that scrapbooking is "now a nearly $3 million industry," but then Jessica Helfand is quoted as saying "It's just when you see this $2.6 billion industry"... So which is it? I'm guessing the latter, since $3 million seems on the low side.

Cary's last line is one of my favorite quotes, from the late Warren Zevon. When he was dying, he appeared on his friend David Letterman's show. Letterman asked him if facing his mortality had taught him anything, and Zevon said, "Just how much you're supposed to enjoy every sandwich." A Zevon tribute CD released after his death was titled "Enjoy Every Sandwich."

For the record, I owned what was (earlier this year) $40,000 worth of AIG stock, inherited from my grandmother. It is now worth under $1000. So I can empathize with you, dear LW. Luckily, I have about 25 years to go 'til I hit retirement age, as well as a new financial adviser to help me make decisions and put things into perspective. He got into the business the week before the crash of '87. I recommend finding an unbiased financial planner with some years under his or her belt who can help you make some good decisions.

My husband is pretty sure that he's the deputy marriage commissioner who performed Meredith and Katrine's wedding at the Oakland Hall of Records on Monday (it was a busy day, a bit of a blur). He started volunteering there right after gay marriage was legalized by the courts a few months ago, and we were both devastated by Prop. 8's passage. On Friday night we marched in the protest in San Francisco, and ran into another lovely female couple he'd just married. We would like to believe it's only a matter of time before gay people get full equality, but this setback has energized us to work harder for what I believe is the civil rights issue of our time. As Sharon Underwood, mother of a gay son, so eloquently put it: "If you want to tout your own morality, you'd best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you. If you disagree, I would be interested in hearing your story, because my own heterosexuality was a blessing I received with no effort whatsoever on my part. It is so woven into the very soul of me that nothing could ever change it." It's not a "choice" or a "lifestyle"; it just is. And those of us who are straight should accept it and move on.

Re: "The Real World Baghdad": "Instead of sending a gaggle of whiny, sexually craven narcissists to some hip, urban location, why not send a bunch of whiny, sexually craven narcissists to war?" Well, that might be taking it a little too far, but in fact, MTV has a new show called "Exiled" that sends the spoiled, affluent teenagers from "My Super Sweet 16" to places like Kenya and the Andes. A recent New York Times article talked about one of the girls' "profound unhappiness when she had to walk several hours for water and help make a hut from a messy paste of cow dung."

...but I adored Cary's response to this letter. Usually, SYA contains letters from the lonely, the heartbroken, the victims; but here's a guy who was blatantly using our favorite forum to indulge his bizarre sexual fantasies, and instead of hitting the delete key, Cary made something funny and creative out of it. I wouldn't want a steady diet of obviously phony letters in SYA, but if Cary wants to indulge in the occasional flight of fancy, I say go for it.