Sports Fact & Book Rec of the Day 1/4/2011

1/4/2006:
Quarterback Vince Young scrambles eight yards for his third touchdown run to boost No. 2 Texas over top-ranked USC, 41-38, in the BCS championship game at the Rose Bowl. The win gives the Longhorns their first national championship since 1970, when they defeated Notre Dame by the score of 21-17 in the Cotton Bowl, and snaps USC's 34-game winning streak. In all, Young connects on 30 of 40 passes and rushes 19 times for 200 yards.

Birthdays:
Johnny Lujack b. 1925
Don Shula b. 1930
Floyd Patterson b. 1935
Kermit Alexander b. 1941
Garrison Hearst b. 1971

Packers Fact:
The Packers beat the Bears 21-15 on kickoff weekend in 2009.

ON LITTLE KIDS, ENIGMATIC

---

Kids Say the Darndest Things host Art Linkletter: What’s the funniest thing that ever happened to you?

Little boy: I came back from the bathroom one day at school. Suddenly I noticed that my zipper was undone and I said to myself, “I’m insulting my own inheritance.”

“You’re gonna make it after all.”

—SONNY CURTIS, American songwriter, “Love Is All Around” (theme song to The Mary Tyler Moore Show)

LIFE IN A BOX

Gabriel is a difficult character. He makes Joseph Cornell sorts of art boxes. When he was young, his father deserted the family. His mother read him Ovid at bedtime. He stole from his neighbors’ houses and found other unseemly ways to make money. Now in his 40s, Gabriel is employed writing obituaries for a second-rate newspaper. He is not particularly outgoing or warm, but for some reason you care when he discovers he is ill and decides to run off to join a strange commune in Mexico. Perhaps it’s because of Stacey D’Erasmo’s extraordinary way with prose—vivid, lyrical, and haunting.

THE SKY BELOW, by Stacey D’Erasmo (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009)