Sports Fact & Book Rec of the Day 1/9/2009

1/9/1972:
The longest winning streak in pro sports history is snapped at 33 games as the defending NBA champion Milwaukee Bucks rout the Los Angeles Lakers, 120-104. Bucks cneter Kareem Abdul-Jabbar outscores Laker counterpart Wilt Chamberlain, 39-15, and Milwaukee runs off an 18-2 spurt on their home court midway in the fourth quarter to win going away. Aided by their two-month-long skein of perfection, the Lakers will go on to compile a 69-13 regular-season mark and remain unstoppable in the playoffs.

Birthdays:
Bart Starr b. 1934
Robert Newhouse b. 1950
M.L. Carr b. 1951
Muggsy Bogues b. 1965
Sergio Garcia b. 1960

Packers Fact:
Green Bay's 16-13 victory over the Eagles on Kickoff Weekend in 2007 marked the first time in five years that the Packers won their home opener.

CLASS IN AMERICA

Americans like to think that they live in an almost classless society, but this book, by a team of reporters at The New York Times, reveals a much more complex class structure with many social, economic, and occupational strata. No mere collection of statistics and theories, the book is made up of engaging stories about individuals and their experiences: a Mexican line cook, a Greek diner owner, a foster child who became a lawyer, heart attack victims, the wife of an executive who is scrambling his way up the corporate hierarchy. Class Matters provides an interesting and thought-provoking insight into today’s society.

CLASS MATTERS, by The New York Times and Bill Keller (Times Books, 2005)

SPACED-OUT SPORTS

A REAL (BUT STRANGE) SPORT

Underwater hockey is played by two teams of six players each, wearing fins, masks, snorkels, gloves, and helmets. They use 12-inch-long hockey sticks to push a puck across the bottom of a swimming pool. Most players can stay under water for about 20 seconds before they have to surface to breathe. The secret to winning: timing your snorkeling with your teammates so that you don’t all swim to the surface at once, which would leave the playing field wide open to the opposing team. Twenty-one teams competed in the 2005 U.S. Nationals in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

IN ITALY, MICKEY MOUSE IS KNOWN AS TOPOLINO.

CUZCO

PERU

Cuzco’s Plaza de Armas, where the ornate Baroque cathedral was built after the Spanish conquest, earlier served for centuries as the center of the Incan empire and still comes to life for Incan sun festivals.

On this day no soup for us:

SOUP

The week beats the fish soup

The chicken hates the soup of

That day a soup

menu items, China