THERE'S SOMETHING YOU SHOULD KNOW. I AM NOT LEFT-HANDED: Hurrah to the United States Women's Fencing team who swept the medal stand in individual sabre. In a threat below, commenter CW notes her own experience at Notre Dame with back-to-back gold medalist Mariel Zagunis.

YOU KNOW THE RULES, AND SO DO I: A message from Barack Obama.

"MAD SOLID": Via frequent commenter Russ, please note that The Office has released 4 webisodes, which you can find here. Check out (on the same page) the short one about Angela's disappointment about being excluded from the webisodes and one summarizing Jim and Pam's relationship.

I'll confess that the episodes did not really seem all that funny to me. In particular, the final chapter sort of peters out in the end.

Another drawback (true of everything on the NBC website) is that you have to sit through a short commercial before every clip.

YOUNG HEARTS RUN FREE: In light of the enthusiastic response to Isaac’s recent post about fear among parents letting their children just run outside and play and mine about the Pan-Mass Challenge, I thought I would share two related stories that I would normally not share in this forum.

Since the end of the school year, a friend named Paul and I have been organizing a weekly informal pickup baseball game for boys and girls aged 8 to 12. Anyone who shows up gets to play. Each of these games has been loads of fun. We have had many children who have never played before and a few children who may well catch the eye of college scouts one day.

I just reserve a field, split the kids into reasonably equal teams, and pitch (to keep the game moving quickly). The kids do almost everything else by themselves. We usually get about 20-24 kids to show up, although the cast varies from week to week. We all have a wicked good time.

While there is obviously a little more structure to this than the “spontaneous” pickup baseball games of my youth, this is about as unstructured a game as you will find these days. One other “freedom” related theme I have noticed as the summer has progressed is that at the start of the summer nearly all of the kids were driven to the field by their parents, who would stay and watch the games, as is common here for Little League games. Now, about half the children walk or bike on their own to the field (I do stick around after the games to make sure everyone has a way to get home). I guess what I am trying to say is that these games have turned out to be sort of liberating for both the kids and their parents.

At this week’s game, I saw D. and R., twins who had played on one of my baseball teams this spring. They had missed many of the pickup games recently. They ran over to me at the start of the game and gave me hugs. Then they handed me an envelope.

Puzzled, I opened it and read the card inside. It turns out that the twins had heard about my ride in the Pan-Mass Challenge and had decided to raise money by selling lemonade for 25 cents a cup. They had managed to raise $50, which they donated to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute on my behalf. Their mother’s best friend (whom I don’t even know) had matched the $50 donation. I am searching the thesaurus for a word to describe my reaction, but the best I can do is to say that I was simply awestruck by their kind and generous gesture.

YOU REALLY SHOULD WEAR GLOVES AT NIGHT, BUT I FIND THAT INTERFERES WITH MY SOCIAL AGENDA: Bernie Mac is dead at the age of 50.

GLORY DAYS: Mrs. Earthling lettered in badminton in high school. This morning, we are reliving the glory days. Right now, a fine match in Women's, between Indonesia and Germany.

OH LOOK, THERE'S THAT HARMONY SYMBOL AGAIN. SEE? WE ARE A HARMONIOUS PEOPLE! I've been kind of half-watching the Opening Ceremonies so far tonight (meaning that I had them on with closed-captioning while I was at the gym). My main reaction so far is awe at the fact that thousands of years of Chinese cultural history have come together at this moment to show the world the grandeur of one of those Sharper Image desk gizmos where you push your face into a bed of nails whilst on the other side the pushed nails form the image on your face. I liked when the people underneath the blocky things popped up and waved to the crowd -- look, Ma, no nails!

Now that I am home and preparing to fast-forward up to the fireworks (which, from the photos I saw today, looked to be pretty spectacular) and then the parade of nations, I would like to share with all of you the question I will be asking myself throughout the triumphant entrance of thousands of athletes representing a couple hundred nations into the Birds' Nest: will a single one of these countries have chosen to outfit its female athletes in either a Wonder Woman sans the Wonder cocktail dress or a Mairzy Doats big floppy hat for the grand cavalcade?

edited to add: I'm sorry, did an announcer just say that China has plans to put a man on the moon by 2024? They can make 2007 lime green costumes in a week, but it's going to take them another 16 years to get to the moon?