Brain Shuffle, 8/24/08

-- Michael Phelps' mother, Deborah, has been talking about how the famous swimmer may have benefitted from having ADD as a kid. Of course I'm very glad for Phelps, but I've always believed that "attention-deficit disorder" is just a fancy word for "being a kid." "He could always focus on things he was passionate about," Deborah said on the radio the other day. Hey, that's great. You know who else can do that? EVERYBODY! That's still no reason to not smack your kid just because they don't want to do homework.

-- Hungary 1956. Czechoslovakia 1968. Georgia 2008. Russia hadn't ever changed; they were just waiting for the right Olympics/American election cycle to turn back into
Russia when nobody was watching.

-- Miller Lite is reportedly bringing back its "Great Taste ... Less Filling" slogan. I hope they also bring back the "All we need is one pin, Rodney" ad from the '80s, even though the footage is ancient and the main character is dead. But hell, Victory Auto Wreckers is still airing the same spot it was using circa 1978 (check out the Packard-looking thing in the junkyard), and that godawful Sun Setter ad must have been shot around 1991, so why not bring back a commercial that's actually good?

-- Here's how bad the Cubs' 13-5 loss to the Washington Nationals on Friday was: Coming into that game, the Nationals had played 29 3-game series this season, and failed to score a total of 13 runs for the series in 22 of them.

-- Two New York high school students used a DNA lab to prove that as much as 25 percent of sushi is actually made from much cheaper fish than advertised, which may explain why you never see any stray tilapia around Asian restaurants.

-- I shouldn't even have to tell people this, but if you're going to stand on the escalator just stand to one side and let other people pass.

-- See, the beauty of the escalator is not that it can get you where you're going with no effort on your part; the beauty is that for the same amount of effort it can get you where you're going in less time.

-- OK, so that thing in the photos wasn't really bigfoot. But isn't it just as exciting that we finally have definitive proof of the existence of rubber gorillas?

-- Confidential to Gary G., formerly of Great Britain: Yeah, try Thailand. It's pretty much impossible to find a way to indulge your deviant sexual preferences there.