Sports Fact & Book Rec of the Day 3/23/2011

3/23/1952:
Bill Mosienko of the Chicago Black Hawks scores the fastest hat trick in NHL history with three goals in 21 seconds of a 7-6 win over the Rangers at Madison Square Garden. Chicago trails 6-2 and the two teams are at even strength when Mosienko scores at 6:09, 6:20 and 6:30 of the third period. Seconds later, he narrowly misses a fourth goal when a shot hits the post. The previous record of 1:52 was set by the Detroit Red Wings' Carl Liscombe in 1938.

Birthdays:
Roger Bannister b. 1929
Geno Auriemma b. 1954
Moses Malone b. 1954
Jason Kidd b. 1973
Mark Buehrle b. 1979

Birthdays:
Cornerback Al Harris played in the NFL for a decade before earning his first Pro Bowl selection in the 2007 season, but his all-star nod in 2008 was his second in a row.

ON DRINKS WITH A LITTLE TOO MUCH KICK

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Cocktails
• Strained Fragmentation Hand Grenade: rum, cream of the Coco, and fragmentation hand grenade

cocktail menu item in Mojácar, Almeria, Spain

“Let’s face the music and dance.”

—IRVING BERLIN, American songwriter

ONLY IN AMERICA

What in the Sam Patch was he thinking? On July 4, 1828, Sam Patch leaped over Passaic Falls, in New Jersey, creating a sensation and a craze for this kind of stunt, which he tried to propogate during the rest of his short life (he died at the age of 30), though originally he was just trying to draw attention to unfair conditions for mill hands. What author Paul Johnson gives here so vividly is 19th-century America, full of wonder and possibility and oddity, changing and reinventing itself almost by the minute. Sam Patch was a nobody who became a somebody who became a celebrity and a victim of his own success.

SAM PATCH, THE FAMOUS JUMPER, by Paul E. Johnson (Hill and Wang, 2004)