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MICHAEL PHELPS: The U.S. swimmer becomes the winningest Olympian ever with his 11th career gold medal.

RUSSIAN INTO WAR: Georgia’s government continues to accuse Russia of attacking the city of Gori despite the cease-fire, and even of moving toward the capital of Tbilisi, although confirmation is difficult.

DRINKING PROBLEM: A judge will decide whether metro Atlantans ever had the right to use Lake Lanier for drinking water.

JOSH SMITH: Interviewed on the Sporting Blog by Bethlehem Shoals following his re-signing with the Hawks.

SILVER BULLET: Transportation officials are discussing the possibility of building a 310-mph, mag-lev bullet train connecting Nashville, Chattanooga and Atlanta.

LAVONIA: Police are accusing a man of keeping his wife and four children captive for three years in a single-wide trailer.

CLAYTON: School board member Rod Johnson becomes the latest to resign. He stepped down after school system attorneys declined to represent him because he had skipped meetings where they were discussing defense strategies for upcoming administrative hearings.

ACCREDIT CHECK: North Carolina Central University’s now-defunct Atlanta satellite campus has been retroactively stripped of its accreditation by SACS, essentially nullifying the degrees earned there by 25 students.

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GOLD RUSH: American swimmer Michael Phelps wins his third gold medal of the 2008 Olympics, his ninth overall, which ties the world record for most career gold medals in Olympic history. He has a chance for two more golds Wednesday morning.

RUSSIA VS. GEORGIA: Russia announced today that it will stop attacking Georgia, but Georgian leaders say they’re still being attacked. An Atlantan and native of the country Georgia is hosting governmental websites from here during the siege, and says those sites are still being cyber-attacked by botnets on the U.S.-based servers. The Times of London lays out the historical context of the war.

WATER USE: In metro Atlanta and North Georgia drops 20 percent, which Environmental Protection Division Director Carol Couch says is a sign that conservation efforts and watering restrictions are working.

GUNS AT AIRPORT: Won’t fly, says a federal judge.

ESCALATING TENSION: In response to frequent “shoe entrapment,” Hartsfield-Jackson begins announcing, at five-minute intervals, the dangers of wearing soft shoes such as flip-flops or Crocs on escalators.

NBAF: Federal officials seem to be favoring a Mississippi site over Athens for the National Agro- and Bio-defense Facility, which will study foot-and-mouth disease and other highly infectious diseases, even though the Mississippi site scored the lowest numerical evaluation among all contenders.

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OLYMPICS: Began today in Beijing (this morning here), at 8:08 p.m. on 8/8/08.

MANIC TROPICAL DEPRESSIONS: Scientists have strengthened their prediction that this hurricane season will be above normal.

CHRIS REDMAN: Starting the Falcons’ preseason opener Saturday night, but all four QBs will likely take snaps.

SUGARLAND: Being sued by former member, coincidentally while the band’s recent album is No. 1 on the Billboard charts, for not continuing to pay her after she left the band to pursue a solo career.

LABOR OF LOVE: Atlanta Business Chronicle reports that Georgia labor leaders are hopeful Obamania will lead to a change in labor laws they say are now stacked in favor of employers.

ZOO ATLANTA: Unveils plans for $200 million expansion over the next 10 to 15 years.

UGA: Gets two federal grants worth $2.5 million to study biofuel production from switchgrass and sunflowers.

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SKIP CARAY: The voice of the Atlanta Braves dies at 68.

OLYMPICS: Beijing’s unprecedented attempts to clear its polluted skies for the Games are drawing scientists from around the world seeking the rare window to study pollution’s dynamics and health effects.

BOLT FROM THE BLUE: Obama starts making moves on seven historically red states, including Georgia, where he opened five offices over the weekend.

LAKE LANIER: Has an alligator in it.

SHOOTING: At Jermaine Dupri’s party at Club Dream early Saturday was reportedly over guests who were angry at being double charged; the only injury reported was a security guard who was shot in the arm but later released from the hospital.

THE VARSITY: Turned 80 this weekend.

TOO EXTREME: The Augusta Chronicle’s editorial board writes that the recently foreclosed “Extreme Makeover” home in Clayton County shows that charity can be taken too far.

COAST NOT CLEAR: Jellyfish, the “cockroaches of the open waters,” are growing in numbers on coasts around the world and forcing many beach closures, which scientists say is a result of overfishing, pollution and rising temperatures killing off their natural predators.

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We’ll never live down Whatizzit, a.k.a. Izzy, the lamest, stupidest aspect of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games. Slate has a piece today defending China’s Olympic mascots that includes a take-down of Izzy and takes some surprising swipes at Atlanta as a city:

Let’s not forget the 1996 Atlanta mascot, known variously as “Whatzit,” “Whatizhee,” or the shortened “Izzy.” To this day, I remain unsure what exactly Izzy was meant to embody. The Journal recalls that he was “derided as everything from a ‘blue slug’ to a ’sperm in sneakers.’ ” (Izzy also represented perhaps the worst Olympics since Munich. The Atlanta games featured both a terrorist attack and a wave of nauseating Nike/Coke/America triumphalism and were held in a backwater of a town smaller than, I’m not kidding, at least 25 Chinese cities you’ve never even heard of.)

Oh, snap! Livejournal blogger elemess rightly points out:

Since when is Atlanta a “backwater”? We have the world’s busiest airport. The world’s most recognizable news organization, the most successful delivery company in history, and the most consumed beverage other than water were all founded here… There are cities in China no one’s heard of larger than practically every Olympic city, including such backwaters as Berlin, Rome, and Athens, not to mention such cosmopolitan locales as Lillehammer and Nagano. Let me let you in on a not-a-secret: Shenyang is a backwater. So are Wuhan, Dongguan, and nearly every other Chinese city that isn’t Beijing, Shanghai, or Hong Kong.

Coincidentally enough, the new documentary Up the Yangtze, which I review this week, conveys the staggering scale of some of those Chinese cities that are obscure to us in the West.

I always hated Whatizzit because the choice felt like an admission (not necessarily correct) that Atlanta lacks its own identity. But I don’t recall Izzy ever being known as “Whatizhee” — is that incorrect, or have I just suppressed that unpleasant memory?

(Image from the official website of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games)

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I need to start eating more cod liver oil or ginseng. My memory is deteriorating.

I heard two weeks ago that Steven Spielberg quit his gig as artistic muckety-muck for the 2008 Beijing Olympics to protest China’s support for the Sudanese government’s genocidal killings in Darfur.

But only ten minutes ago did I remember I wrote last year about how Spielberg didn’t seem to have any problem with China’s actions until actress Mia Farrow publicly shamed him.

Wrote Farrow in a Wall Street Journal op-ed:

“Does Mr. Spielberg really want to go down in history as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games?”

Nearly one year since Farrow publicly asked the question, Spielberg has finally answered no.

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