Michael Phelps surpassed Mark Spitz as the most successful swimmer and Olympian of all time as he won an unprecedented eighth gold at the 2008 Games.

The win gave him his eighth gold at these Games, one more than Spitz in 1972, and his 14th in all, five more than anyone in the Olympics' 112-year history.

His 2008 Olympics goes down as one of the greatest athletic feats of all-time.

American Michael Phelps scorched to his sixth gold and his sixth world record in the Water Cube pool, closing in on Mark Spitz's 1972 record of seven golds in a Games. The 23-year-old now has 12 career Olympic golds, three more than anyone else. Like Spitz in 1972, all of his golds at these Games have come in world record times.

Nastia Liukin led an american 1-2 punch and won a gold in the women's all round gymnastics. A dazzling floor exercise by Liukin somersaulted her to victory ahead of fellow American Shawn Johnson and China's Yang Yilin. Victory was sweet after China had profited from nervous mistakes by the U.S. women to win their first team gold.

American swimmer Michael Phelps won his first gold medal of the 2008 games in the 400 meters individual medley final in Beijing's futuristic Water Cube with a time of 4.03.84, knocking more than a second of his own previous world record.

The Hall of Fame induction ceremony turned Hog wild Saturday.

Former Washington Redskins Art Monk and Darrell Green were inducted into the National Football Hall of Fame.

"Standing up here on this platform is much different than I imagined," Monk said. "The reality of getting into the Pro Football Hall of Fame didn’t really hit me till a few days ago. And then to see the magnitude of all of this, and all of you, it’s been something amazing."

The largest ovation was for Monk, who retired in 1995 as the NFL’s career receptions leader with 940 catches—apparently not enough to make it into the Hall of Fame on his first seven chances.

As usual, Green, did his own thing, though. The only player in the ‘08 class selected in his first year of eligibility was also the only one to cry, and he was proud of it. "Deacon Jones said I was gonna cry. You bet I’m gonna cry," he said after his son, Jared, introduced him. ...read more here...

And the Washington Redskins won their first game under new head coach Jim Zorn, by beating the Indiaapolis Colts in the Hall of Fame game in Canton, Ohio, 30-16.

Exxon Mobil just announced the biggest quarterly profit of any corporation in U.S. history, breaking its own previous record with $11.68 billion in earnings during the second quarter of 2008.

The company's revenue surged 40 percent, to $138.07 billion for the quarter. If it were a country, the company would have the 18th-largest economy in the world.

What's in a barrel of crude oil? The chart below shows.

For a complete breakdown on why gas cost $4.00 a gallon, who uses it, where it comes from and how the price of a gallon of gas has changed, see this chart at The Washington Post

It's true, Shannen Doherty will be joining her fellow "Beverly Hills 90201" cast mates Jennie Garth and Tori Spelling on the new CW spin-off "90210."

Olsson's Books, one of the oldest independent booksellers in Washington D.C., plans to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, founder John Olsson said yesterday. Pressed by creditors who have filed claims against the company's inventories and by rising overhead costs, Olsson's is closing at least one store and will evaluate its ability to operate its remaining five properties, an attorney for the company said.

"The book business is getting a little soft. It's not selling as much as it used to," Olsson said. "Our music sales went from 50 percent of our business to maybe 15. We lost a lot of revenue, and at the same time rents went up and real estate taxes went up. I don't know what we would have done differently. It's a killer."

Olsson's closed its Penn Quarter store, which opened 15 years ago. Olsson said rents and taxes had risen beyond affordability at the store and acknowledged falling behind on payments to booksellers.

Olsson, 76, began selling books and records in the District 50 years ago and has battled the economic forces of big-box competition and Internet sales. But ultimately his business is being strained by forces close to home. "We sort of helped make the neighborhood what it is. And it's a great neighborhood, but we can't afford the rent," Olsson said. A few years ago, the store's rent in the renovated Lansburgh department store building was $30 a square foot. Now, it has risen to $50 to $60 a square foot.

Over the years, Olsson's has battled to maintain profitability against the megastores like "Borders" and "Barnes and Noble", eventhough Olsson's was one of the first to combine books, music and a coffee cafe in the same store, long before the meagastores started doing it.

The closing leaves Olsson's with five stores, down from the nine the company operated around 2002. My favorite is still the store in old town Alexandria, Virginia.

Happy 4th of July!!!

From The Washington Post

Microsoft experienced a ritual yesterday that is common to offices across America: a valued employee's last day. Co-workers paused to gather around their departing colleague, speeches were made and perhaps some cake was consumed.

But this employee isn't just any staff member; he is Bill Gates. Although he will remain chairman, his day-to-day role with the company is over. How do you sum up 33 years spent building the world's largest software company? What accomplishments do you highlight? What topics are best avoided for the sake of politeness?

In Gates's case, sometimes it's hard to tell.

The BASIC Way: 1975

Gates and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen wrote an efficient, useful version of this programming language that ran on the first personal computers, opening software development to mere hobbyists. From the first text-only, keyboard-bound MS-DOS releases onward, one of the foremost virtues of Microsoft's operating systems has been the staggering variety of third-party programs available for them.

Word Arrives: 1983

With this word-processing program, the company laid the foundations for its nearly omnipresent Microsoft Officesuite and largely defined how most people write today. (That's not all good: Many Word users think a 1985 Washington Post's review's description of Word as "slow and complicated" still applies.) A quarter-century later, Word has become such a standard that Microsoft's biggest marketing problem is persuading customers to trade up to new versions.

Replaced Windows: 1995

The jump from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 still constitutes the most dramatic improvement Microsoft has provided with an upgrade. Win 95 let millions of users forget about DOS commands and start checking out the Internet, and its interface set the pattern for Microsoft's subsequent operating systems. But Win 95 also standardized aspects of Microsoft computing, like the install/uninstall routines used to add or remove programs, that should have been retired years ago.

Explorer Sets Sail: 1995

This Web browser has gone from being an upstart innovator challenging a dominant player (Netscape Navigator) to the dominant player challenged by an upstart innovator (Navigator's open-source descendant, Mozilla Firefox). Why? Through arrogance or neglect, Microsoft all but ceased Explorer's development once it had monopoly status -- even as the Web became increasingly cluttered, confusing and dangerous.

Behind the Music: 1999

The company built the Windows Media Digital Rights Management software to help record labels and movie studios distribute controlled copies of their work online, but things didn't go according to the script. Some firms in Hollywood shied away from giving Microsoft such a major role in their business; stores running on Windows Media DRM repelled customers with absurd usage limitations; Apple built a simpler, more compatible DRM setup that customers could actually tolerate -- and now much of the music sold online comes without DRM at all.

Xbox Nation: 2001

The personal computers many people use these days don't look like traditional PCs at all. With the Xbox, Microsoft showed that it could compete outside the realm of machines with keyboards and mice -- and helped knock Sega out of the video game business.

Maria Sharapova lost in the second round at Wimbledon yesterday, but she still looked great.

The Washington Capital's Alex Ovechkin capped off a special season by capturing the NHL’s two most prestigious individual awards. He won the Hart Trophy as league MVP and the Lester B. Pearson Award as the players’ choice for the most outstanding player.

Oveckin also won the Rocket Richard Trophy with a league-best 65 goals and the Art Ross Trophy with 112 points.Ovechkin was the first player to score 60 goals since Mario Lemieux in 1996.

Capitals coach Bruce Boudreau, hired after Washington’s woeful start, earned the Jack Adams Award as the NHL’s top bench boss. Washington went 37-17-7 after Boudreau was hired on Nov. 22.

Almost 2 million people in the United States earn their living as artists, according to a new study by the National Endowment for the Arts. In number of artists, Washington ranks fourth among the top 50 metropolitan areas.

Marai Sharapova is into the round of 16 in the 2008 French Tennis Open.

The dueling Davids garnered a record 97.5 million votes between them, smashing the previous record by 23 million.

Also, it was announced that seventeen-year-old Josiah Leming, known as the teary-eyed "American Idol" contestant who just missed making it through the show's Hollywood audition rounds, has signed with Warner Bros. Records for a record and publishing deal. He is to begin recording his album this week.

Washington Capitals star left-winger Alex Ovechkin was named the 2008 National Hockey League player of the year by the Sporting News. Ovechkin picked up 250 of a possible 287 votes in a poll of players from around the NHL conducted for the sporting magazine.

The 22-year-old Russian led the NHL in goals with 65 to capture the league's Maurice (Rocket) Richard Trophy as the top goal-scorer and had 112 points to win the Art Ross Trophy as the league's leading scorer. Ovechkin led the league in power-play goals (22), game-winning goals (11) and shots (446).

Washington Post

Happy birthday, spam.

P.S.: Now go away.

It was 30 years ago this Saturday that users of Arpanet, a U.S. government-designed precursor to the Internet, logged onto their accounts to find what is considered the first piece of unsolicited commercial e-mail ever sent.

It was a pitch for a new computer. "We invite you to come see the 2020 and hear about the DECSYSTEM-20 family at the two product presentations we will be giving in California this month," read the missive, sent by a salesman named Gary Thuerk on May 3, 1978.

Thuerk's e-mail prompted an aggravated discussion among the service's users, the relatively small number of high-level academics with access to computers that then cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

"This is a clear and flagrant abuse of the directory!" one of the hundreds of users on Thuerk's recipient list complained in a public reply.

It's unclear at this point whether Thuerk was able to sell any computers through his then-novel approach, but both spam and spam prevention have grown into major industries since that day. Market research firm Ferris Research estimates that business will spend $42 billion fighting spam this year in the United States. That's up from $35 billion last year. ...read full article here...

Maria Sharapova, of Russia, holds up the winner's trophy after winning the final-round tennis match at the Bausch & Lomb Championships 7-6 6-3 against Dominika Cibulkova, Sunday, April 13, 2008, in Amelia Island, Fla.

With goals from Tomas Fleischmann, Sergei Federov and Alexander Semin, as well as another strong performance from Cristobal Huet, the Capitals beat the Florida Panthers, 3-1, to complete a historic comeback and clinch their first playoff berth in five years.

With wins in 11 of their final 12 games, including seven straight, the Capitals accomplished something that had never been done: making the playoffs after rallying from 14th or 15th place at the season's midpoint.

The victory also might have wrapped up the Hart Trophy as league MVP for Alex Ovechkin, who took five shots but was unable to improve upon his league-best 65 goals and 112 points. It also means Bruce Boudreau and Backstrom will receive serious consideration for coach and rookie of the year, respectively.

With the victory, Washington (43-31-8) closed the regular season on a seven-game winning streak. It lost just once in its final 12 games en route to its first division crown since 2000-01.

Washington Nationals win Opening game 3-2, in new stadium with a walk-off homerun in the bottom of the ninth by Ryan Zimmerman.

Charlottesville Book Festival Begins Today

...The festival features around 180 events at 86 venues throughout Charlottesville and the University of Virginia. The events will focus on all types of books, including history, mysteries, politics, sociology, self-help, food and wine, travel, religion, graphic novels, science fiction, entertainment and much more.

Baseball's Spring Training is finally underway in Florida, and Opening Day is just a month a way.

Washington Nationals Willy Mo Pena is expecting to have a big year for the Nats in their new DC Stadium this year.