Sports Fact & Book Rec of the Day 1/7/2009

1/7/1978:
Marvin Johnson scores 31 points and grabs 11 rebounds to lead the New Mexico Lobos to a 102-98 victory over UNNLV, snapping the Runnin' Rebels' 72-game home-court winning streak at the Las Vegas Convention Center. It was nearly four years ago that UNLV most recently lost a home game, bowing to the Houston Cougars, 75-72.

Birthdays:
Alvin Dark b. 1922
Eddie LeBaron b. 1930
Tony Conigliaro b. 1945
Eric Gagne b. 1976
Alfonso Sorlano b. 1976

A KIND OF GENIUS

In a captivating first-person account of life with autism, Daniel Tammet tells of his double-edged life of amazing gifts and bizarre handicaps. Ultimately, his story is one of triumph and transcendence. Besides the usual astounding abilities of such people (he can recite pi out to the 22,514th digit, for instance, and learned a foreign language in a single week), Tammet is also a gifted storyteller. Booklist said (in a starred review) that Tammet writes with “the clearest prose this side of Hemingway.”

BORN ON A BLUE DAY: INSIDE THE EXTRAORDINARY MIND OF AN AUTISTIC SAVANT, by Daniel Tammet (Simon & Schuster, 2007)

AN AMAZING FIND

In the 1950s an Italian woman gave a painting of a rural landscape to her nephew. He liked it and hung it up in his house. It wasn’t until 2005, when he had an art-expert friend over for dinner, that he learned it was an original painting by Vincent van Gogh. Its worth: an estimated $45 million.

AWESOME AUSTRALIA

The dramatic granite mountains, white-sand beaches, and lapis-blue ocean in Tasmania’s Freycinet National Park are just one of the rich landscapes that Australia has chosen to preserve as national parks. Sample these others and their diverse gifts:

• Cradle Mountain: Tasmanian peaks and moorlands.
• Daintree: Ancient rain forest in Queensland.
• Uluru: The great red monolith of Ayers Rock
• Kakadu: Pristine river and marshland

THERE ARE MORE THAN 60,000 ACRES OF SHOPPING MALLS IN THE U.S.

I Love my unicorn, he knows I am true,

My troubles go poof, my unicorn named Boo.

*from singer Mariah Carey's eloquent poem "The Unicorn"