THE NORMAL BITS & PIECES: Today my brother and his merry band of young Republicans--sponsored by my dad's surgical practice--competed in a hundred-mile bike race from Philadelphia to Mays Landing, NJ. I was getting sweaty just waiting at the finish line, so you can imagine how much water they all lost, and gained, and lost again by the end of hundred miles. (Not kilometers, thank god. U-S-A!) My brother is one skinny dude right now. But it was all for a good cause, fighting against cancer in all its manifestations.

The obvious question is: why should a morbid obesity specialist sponsor a bike team? Well, 1. it's his son's team. And 2. that's about it. There's not a huge overlap between the morbidly obese community and the bicycling community. Apparently, though, some business cards were tossed to spectators on their cross-Jersey trip, so maybe my dad'll get some calls tomorrow from the people inspired to lose weight from the skinny Republicans on the bikes. Not inspired to get on the bikes themselves obviously, but to lose the weight in a more dramatic fashion. That would be nice.

Shaq: still headed to Miami. Going to the team that never got mentioned early on when Dallas was the sure thing because Cubes had all the money and the big contracts and so on. Or the Kings or the Nets for the same reasons. So much for the uniquely entertaining Miami Heat--now we get the feared 60-win (or thereabouts) Miami Heat. So much for the Duncan-Shaq and Yao-Shaq duels; he'll play the Big Z four times a year and that's about it. I'm not so excited about this move (as I said yesterday) because Shaq & Wade is not much different from Shaq & Kobe, except Wade probably doesn't need to be The Man like Kobe does. So maybe having somebody perfectly willing to give the ball to Shaq will be chemically superior to the creative disunity that burned itself out in Staples over the last few seasons.

Kobe: still not a Clipper.

Boozer: still scum. Though perhaps John Paxson was kind of dumb too.

Sealab 2021 is an often mean-spirited, absurdist, and completely hilarious show. I'm going to go watch it. Gawd, do you believe I just went to bed and didn't go to the attic to get the Gruenwald Captain Americas? Priorities, priorities.