Sports Fact & Book Rec of the Day 12/30/2010

12/30/1959:
All-American Oscar Robertson scores an ECAC Holiday Festival record 50 points to lead the top-ranked Cincinnati Bearcats to a 96-83 victory over Iowa in the finals of the Christmas week tournament at Madison Square Garden. On the way to winning his third straight NCAA scoring title, the Big O amasses a tourney record 122 points in three games against St. Bonaventure, St. Joseph's and tonight against Iowa. The Hawkeyes, led by Don Nelson (25 points), race off to an 11-point lead in the first half, but Robertson single-handedly furnishes the Bearcats with a 12-point halftime lead by pouring in 33 points before the intermission, leaving the New York audience awestruck.

Birthdays:
Sandy Koufax b. 1935
Tiger Woods b. 1975
A.J. Pierzynski b. 1976
Kenyon Martin b. 1977
LeBron James b. 1984

Packers Fact:
In the first NFL postseason overtime game since the famous 1958 title game, the Packers beat the Baltimore Colts 13-10 in a Western Conference playoff in 1965.

"Each Sold Separately"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fr2sCLLrHU0
You'd think they'd have worn out the tape for Also sprach Zarathustra by the end of the third commercial. Watch this compilation of the decidedly low-tech commercials Mego made for its Planet of the Apes figures, forts, and accessories to see how little it took to get kids excited about toys in the final years before Star Wars upped the ante for everyone.

CELEBRATING PAUL BOWLES

One of America’s most original and startling writers, whose short fiction was “among the best ever written by an American” according to Gore Vidal, was born on this day 100 years ago. Bowles wrote sensuous and violent tales of people who lose their way, usually in sultry tropical places or in the North African desert, and often regret it. Published the year after his extraordinary novel The Sheltering Sky, these stories are some of Bowles’s best work.

THE DELICATE PREY AND OTHER STORIES, by Paul Bowles (1950; Harper Perennial, 2006)