I felt compelled to write, even though most people reading this column don't care about cycling, including King. The Tour is an institution and can and will survive the latest scandals. Viewership in most of Europe was up or the same as previous years. Over a million people showed up to watch each stage. The stages in London had some of the largest crowds in history. While the story of German public television dropping the Tour is dramatic, a satellite channel in Germany picked up the coverage the next day.

To some degree, it's good that the sport is being embarrassed like this. Rasmussen should have never been allowed to start the Tour given the rules he broke. It shouldn't have taken a random sighting by a commentator to bring things to a head in that situation.

If there is a silver lining in all of this, it does appear that the cheats are getting caught. Cycling has a long doping history, so it's going to take time to really clean up the sport. The next generation of riders are the hope. The "old guard" of riders, directors, and coaches need to get out of the sport. Sponsors need to insist that anyone with a whiff of doping scandal in their past not be hired, including staff. Riders with a history of working with suspect doctors and coaches should be shunned. Riders need to come clean with what they're doing and who they're working with. Breaking the silence will go a long way to cleaning up the sport.

So I can see some women falling for this schtick, but I think most women who aren't half-ripped or have more than a couple of brain cells to rub together can see right through him. I mean seriously, if a guy dressed like that approached most women they'd be laughing their asses off. I imagine this guy will be a gold mine of snark for I Like To Watch and Television Without Pity, which makes him OK in my book.

We've been reusing plastic bags for years, but this year we decided to buy some sturdy shopping bags so could eliminate the need for plastic as much as possible. It's been great, so far. As someone else mentioned, we purchased them from reusablebags.com. We bought the heavy duty ones that are the size of a standard paper grocery bag. They are super sturdy and we love them. We also bought mess and canvas produce bags.

In addition to the scourge of plastic bags, there are also those fancy paper bags at retail stores. I know that it's a marketing tool for them and shoppers love those pretty graphics, but the ticker bags in particular seem to use a lot of paper. Add to that the tissue paper that some stores use to wrap purchases in. Unless something I breakable, I usually ask them not to wrap my items. I try to reuse the shopping bags as much as I can, but it's not always easy. At least the paper ones are recyclable as mixed paper products.

The book was moving and while it was quite sympathetic to McCandless, it was also honest about his shortcomings. Several reviews have mentioned "Christ-like" and it makes me wince. I fear that Penn has overly sentimentalized his life. While to some degree I admire what Chris was trying to do with his life, he was ridiculously ill prepared and in a sense disrespectful to nature. I was hoping the film would be better balanced.

Are you kidding me? Ms. Faludi needs to get out of whatever shell she has been living under, knock the boulder sized chip off of her shoulder, and spend some time amongst real women. If 9/11 pushed women back into the kitchen, someone forgot to tell me and all of my female friends.

david sugarman, if what you got out of Layla was that it was about an exotic beauty, well, that's your right. Pattie Boyd was a beautiful young woman, she's 60 years old now for god's sake. It's not like Clapton is an Adonis himself. Anyway Layla was, to a lot of people, about an intense obsessive love and it certainly made sense to me.

As for Schultz, I don't think the revelations in the book are that amazing. It might be shocking to people with only a surface level understanding of the man, but as others have said, most people know that artists who we admired are human and fallable What is sad is that the author spent a bit too much time on the negative. His family adored him and in the end I guess that matters most.

My husband loves Ugly Betty. Damn, I didn't realize he was a big ol' gay boy. We better go shopping. Stat!

Ask anyone actually IN advertising when was the last time they met anyone like those characters.

Since the show is set in 1960, I suspect no one IN advertising right now would have much recollection of people like the characters in the show.

Come on, you gotta be pulling our collective legs.

As for the Bionic Woman, the writing and acting are bad, but what got me was the lame special effects. You'd think these guys could do better, unless they're doing it intentionally as some sort of homage to the original show. Doubt it. Katee Sackoff if the best thing about the show. Too bad she wasn't cast as the lead.