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1. Redskins owner Daniel Snyder has paid $34.5 million for an 8.8 percent stake in amusement park company Six Flags Inc., according to Reuters. Snyder's first move will be to try to sign Disney's Splash Mountain to a free-agent deal.

2. Braves third baseman Chipper Jones has named his third child Shea. The boy, born Monday morning, is named after Shea Stadium, where the rival Mets play and where Jones has pummeled New York pitching over the years. Jones also considered the names DHL and Nokia but couldn't agree to terms.

3. General Mills has unveiled three Wheaties boxes for the U.S. market featuring Olympic gold medalists Michael Phelps, Carly Patterson and Justin Gatlin. Wheaties will also roll out a Svetlana Khorkina box in Russia, designed to be served with sour milk.

4. The Buccaneers are the latest pro team to announce plans for a new team-branded network. The cable channel should be up and running in time for the team's 2005 training camp. The network will not air 24 hours when it debuts, however, because team research has shown that only coach Jon Gruden can stay up that long.

5. The 10 Spot presents its Politician of the Week award to Washington, D.C. city council member Jack Evans. The councilman announced that if Major League Baseball decides to move the Expos to Northern Virginia, D.C. lawmakers might play hardball to prevent that team from its plan of playing in RFK Stadium until a new stadium can be built. Said Evans: "There would be enough anger in the city, including my own, that the council could pass legislation that would keep a Northern Virginia team out of RFK." Then the always politic Evans shrewdly indicated that he had not discussed such potential legislation with MLB, saying, "That would be too much of a threat." Don't worry, Councilman Evans, Bud won't hear about it from us.

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6. NBC finished with a 15.0 cumulative rating for the Athens Olympics, nine percent better than the 13.8 it achieved in Sydney. The network now has high hopes for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, especially since NBC and Chinese organizers have already established a terrific working relationship. Communist government officials have reportedly expressed great admiration for the way that NBC controls Olympic information.

7. The Greeks certainly like to leave things until the last minute. Just as the world is paying homage to Athens for its thoroughly effective mad dash to complete all the Olympic venues on time, the Greeks are wondering what to do next. It appears that Athens Olympic chiefs neglected, or simply forgot, to draft post-Games proposals for most of the 35 competition venues and 72 training facilities. Still, you've got to give the Greeks big points for honesty. "Unfortunately, there isn't any plan," confessed government spokesman Theodoris Roussopoulos last week. Can you imagine an American politician of any party admitting something like that -- especially if it was true?

8. A Washington Post study showed that while the U.S. led the medals table at the Olympics, it ranked near the bottom in medals per gross domestic product. In New York, the Republicans pledged that if the Bush administration gets four more years, it will improve that ratio in 2008 by any means necessary. Democrats countered that lowering GDP shouldn't count.

9. Reader mail: From Harry of Windsor, N.C., "Do you see North Carolina getting a MLB team any time soon?" Bud, is that you? Really, Mr. Commissioner, eventually you're going to have to decide where to move the Expos on your own. Stop stalling. Time's a-wasting.

10. The majority of readers supported the 10 Spot's backing of Paul Hamm telling FIG to stick it, but others felt that he should give the medal back because he really didn't deserve to win. Yet those who state it as an indisputable fact that if Yang Tae Young had received the proper starting score in the parallel bars that he necessarily would have won don't really understand gymnastics. Let's hear from Miranda of New York: "As a former collegiate gymnast, I can't agree more on Paul Hamm. Gymnastics judging is subjective -- if the judges could review all the routines on video a day later, all the scores would change! The result should stand." SI.com's E.M. Swift, who has covered gymnastics for decades, had an excellent article about this that still bears reading.

If Yang had received the proper score on the parallel bars, he would have entered his final rotation (the high bar) with a tidy lead. How would that have affected his performance? Would he have relaxed, or turned conservative, or become uptight with gold so near his grasp? We don't and can't know. That's one reason that protests must be filed by the end of a particular rotation, which the Koreans failed to do.

Let's also consider the judges. They are human too, as we know all too well. If Yang had been further ahead but turned in something less than a terrific final routine, the judges might have been a little harsher on his score, to leave room for someone else (like Hamm) to snatch away the gold with a dazzling performance. That's not the way it's supposed to work, but that's often how it does. Also, if Hamm had repeated the tremendous routine that he closed the competition with, who's to say that the judges might not have still deemed him worthy of the gold, and figured out what score they needed to give in order to make that possible? (Not by colluding, but by each being a tad more generous.) The point is, there are a lot of moving parts. You can't add .10 to Yang's score in the next-to-last routine and say with certainty that's how it would have ended any more than one can take away a run in the sixth inning of what eventually turns out to be a one-run baseball game and say that the rest of the game would have proceeded precisely as it did the first time around. Plus there's the nasty fact that if Yang's parallel bar routine is subjected to the same videotape analysis that discovered the incorrect starting score, it reveals that he made four holds on the bar rather than three, a mandatory .20 deduction that was also missed by the judges. Shouldn't we take that out too if we're being "fair," which would snatch Yang's gold right back and give it to Hamm once more?

At first, part of me hoped that Hamm might offer to share the gold with Yang. That was before I learned a bit more about how gymnastics is scored, and well before many members of the media tried to pressure Hamm to give up the medal. FIG's outrageous move -- ruling officially that Hamm won the gold legitimately under its rules while simultaneously pressuring Hamm to give up the gold in a letter that called Yang the "true winner" -- just made me sympathize more with Hamm. That was a classic case of passing the buck. If Hamm wants to share his gold, which doesn't appear would be the case, I would applaud him. If he holds onto it, I will still applaud. He really does deserve that gold medal.