Sports Fact & Book Rec of the Day 1/18/2011

1/18/1958:
Willie O'Ree debuts for the Boston Bruins during a 3-0 win against the Canadiens in Montreal. A native of Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, 23-year-old O'Ree becomes the first black player in the National Hockey League. He'll play in only two games this season but will return to appear in 43 contests in 1960-61. Playing minor league hockey until 1979, when he's 43, he'll have a long career despite being 95% blind in his right eye, the result of being hit with a puck in 1956. In 2008, he'll receive the Order of Canada, the highest civilian award for a Canadian citizen.

Birthdays:
Syl Apps b. 1915
Curt Flood b. 1938
Mark Messier b. 1961
Brady Anderson b. 1964
Mike Lieberthal b. 1972

Packers Fact:
The Packers' defense picked off 22 passes in 2008. The only NFL team with more interceptions that seasons was the Baltimore Ravens with 26 thefts (Chicago and Tampa Bay also had 22).

ON ANIMAL BOOKS, WEIRD

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• Second-hand Parrots: A Complete Owner’s Pet Manual

• Neurosis Induced Cannibalism in Antarctic Pigs

actual book titles

“The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the soul’s very life.”

—JOHN UPDIKE, American writer

THE NEW CLASSICS

Friedrich Glauser was addicted to morphine and opium for most of his life. He started writing detective novels during his stay in a Swiss insane asylum. Even so, his renown as a crime-fiction writer became such that the German equivalent of the Edgar award is called the Glauser. In The Chinaman the very superior Sergeant Studer of the Bern Police Department must solve two murders, one of which involves a shot through the heart of a man whose clothes are not disturbed by any bullet hole. This is the fourth in the Sergeant Studer series.

THE CHINAMAN: A SERGEANT STUDER MYSTERY, by Friedrich Glauser, translated from the German by Mike Mitchell (first German edition 1938; Bitter Lemon Press, 2008)