Oh I love Law & Order - it is so easy for me to get caught up in it.

I love the stories but as a soap opera historian I also enjoy watching to see how many old soap stars or even future soap stars I can find. They are good at hiring them.

Many of the current soap stars had their first roles on there. I jsut saw one the other day where Jeff Branson who just left AMC was on when he was pretty young.

Well, no wonder you like L&O (not my favourite show, but I think it's very good at what it does): its showrunner is Neal Baer.

I'll offer a little defense of last week's ratings. I watched Wimbledon in the morning and not Y&R. Wimbledon is once a year and I can catch up on Y&R pretty easily. A few weeks earlier, I watched Tiger Woods and the U.S. Open Golf Tournament instead of any soaps. It was the same logic. It's easy to catch up on a soap, but Tiger Woods was fun to watch that week.

A small defense: second summer semester for university's starts around the fourth of July in many places. Students often take off the first semester and then take classes in the second summer. The little age dips might happen then. You know maybe some of these little dips are just people have a life.

The Olympics are really going to take a toll on DOOL, and it might take a toll on a lot of soaps. For me, it's the same thing: If there is some interesting event on the Olympics, I watch it becuase, yep, I can easily catch up on the soaps.

It doesn't explain consistent ratings falls, but I think special sporting events or news events are easy to watch as opposed to watching a soap every single day.

That is one of the problems with the ratings. I DVR all my soaps, but there are many times that I don't get to watch them until the weekend. Most nights when I get home I am watching the Cubs game and don't always get to the soaps I taped. They only count DVR's if you watch the same day you record and that is only if you have a Nielsen box. I am sure they can track who is recording what and should be using that to track ratings as well.

Although I will say Days better have some really good cliffhangers to get people to tune back in after the Olympics. I remember last time they did a big promo at the end of the first week back storylines instead of their regular next episode promo. But then if people don't like sports that is on during the day, they might turn to another soap.