Sports Fact & Book REc of the Day 3/14/09

3/14/1970:
St. Bonaventure wins the Eastern Regional of the NCAA basketball tournament with a 97-74 rout of Villanova but loses All-American center Bob Lanier with torn knee ligaments in his right leg, sidelining him for next week's Final Four. Lanier had 26 points and 14 rebounds before Villanova guard Chris Ford drove the lane and crashed into him. The third-ranked Bonnies improve to 25-1 with this victory, but they'll be hopelessly out-manned by Jacksonville's tandem of seven-footers, Artis Gilmore and Pembroke Burrows, in the national semifinals and lose, 91-83.

Birthdays:
Bob Charles b. 1936
Wes Unseld b. 1946
Kirby Puckett b. 1961
Kevin Brown b. 1965
Larry Johnson b. 1969

Packers Fact:
Defensive tackle Justin Harrell wore uniform number 91 in his first year with Green Bay in 2007. He wore 92 in college at Tennessee. That number hash been retired by the Packers in honor of Reggie White.

NEWTON’S BAD APPLE

The murder of a woman of letters who was writing a controversial new biography of Isaac Newton leads to investigations of deaths in both present-day Cambridge and the plague-ridden university of Newton’s day. While our narrator, Lydia, undertakes to finish the book at the request of her lover, the murdered writer’s son, she is in danger, too, from the spirits that Newton may have raised while dabbling in alchemy. Publishers Weekly starred review.

GHOSTWALK, by Rebecca Stott (Spiegel and Grau, 2007)

THE BARE FACTS

In June 2004 a man from Rapid City, Iowa, was robbed by strangers after he answered the door in the nude. The man, whose name was not released by police, claimed he was sleeping in the buff when he was awakened by a knock on his hotel-room door. When he answered the door he was tackled by “an undisclosed number of assailants” who hit him on the head and then ran off with his wallet and pants. Police later recovered the man’s pants from the hotel parking lot; at last report the wallet was still missing.

IF THE HEADS ON MT. RUSHMORE HAD BODIES, THE FIGURES WOULD BE NEARLY 500 FEET TALL.

On Double Identities:

Interviewer: What was the last book or books you read?

Soccer star Howard Kendall: My own autobiography, which, interestingly enough, was written by The Guardian's Ian Ross.

GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE

See the answer tomorrow.

Q: Xanadu, the pleasure palace of the haunted hero in Orson Welles’s film masterpiece Citizen Kane, was modeled on this California estate. Who was the real-life owner?

a) Charlie Chaplin b) William Randolph Hearst c) Howard Hughes d) Mary Pickford