HEY, AND I'M RIDING AROUND, RIDING AROUND ON IT: You've asked if we could have a thread to discuss the Tour de France. Consider it done.

(I have nothing to add to the conversation, unless we get into the Vanity Fair piece on Sheryl Crow from the new issue.)

WHY IS THE RUM ALWAYS GONE? I have a question about the underwhelming-but-still-fun-enough Pirates II: Yo Ho Ho and a Jar of Dirt, but it's totally a spoiler, so meet me in the comments if you've seen the movie.

HIS NAME WAS LOGAN, HE WAS A SHOWMAN: I'm not sure that this trailer mashup provides a more or less convincing Wolverine origin story than did Origin, but it's worth a few minutes of your time in any event.

GEORGE, GOOSE, GARFUNKEL, GARTH, AND GROMIT: With no blockbuster to flog this week (sorry Shawn Wayans fans), EW goes the list route, naming the 50 greatest sidekicks of all time. Who's No. 1? You are correct, sir, if you guessed Ed McMahon.

MY NOMINEES -- "BRAND NEW LOVE" BY SEBADOH, AND JUST BECAUSE IT'S ON MY MIND, "SURRENDER" BY CHEAP TRICK: Bill Simmons' mailbag contains the following question -- what songs would have been better had Bruce Springsteen recorded them? After starting off with a discussion of Bruce's stealing ownership of "One Headlight" from the Wallflowers at the 1997 VMAs, Simmons adds this list:

'See a Little Light' by Bob Mould; 'Taillights Fade' by Buffalo Tom (and just for the record, I absolutely love those guys, but that would have been a top-five Bruce song); 'Way Down Now' by World Party; 'Rain King' by Counting Crows; 'Expresso Love' by Dire Straits; the theme to 'Beautiful Girls'; 'Turn the Page' by Bob Seger; and my personal favorites, 'Santa Monica' and 'You Make Me Feel Like A Whore' by Everclear. Bruce also would have done much better with 'I Am Mine' than Pearl Jam did because Eddie Vedder mailed in that entire album during his 'I don't want to be famous anymore' stage.

What else? (Also, I will take this excuse to link to one or two of my favorite VMA performances.)

YOU'VE READ THE BOOK, SO WHAT HAVE YOU FOUND? I finished Carolyn Parkhurst's Lost and Found last night (which a few folks in the comments have mentioned), and although I barrelled through it, I'm still not sure what to think of it. The book uses a fictional TAR-esque reality show as a prism to examine its competitors, using rotating narrators to follow the teams from place to place. It's a strange book, satirizing reality TV, the idea of "ex-gay," and having some wickedly funny things to say about 80s-90s sitcoms and child stars, while simultaneously going to some very dark places--a mother/daughter team has a secret that's right out of a Jodi Picoult book (seriously, Plain Truth) and a man coping with his son's illness--in Lost-esque flashbacks. I'm still not sure if it works--some of the narrators and plot threads are far more interesting than others, one of the more interesting narrators (the show's host) is given short shrift, and the book goes on a bit after a climactic confrontation in Northern Ireland to an ending that leaves the reader with a sense of "and?"--but it's still worth reading.

AND RED MAKES THREE: Celebrities on the brink can breathe a brief breath of relief now that Red Buttons, a.k.a. "The Yiddish Leprechaun," has passed joining June Allyson and Syd Barrett.