Sports Fact & Book Rec of the Day 3/24/2011

3/24/1936:
The Detroit Red Wings and Montreal Maroons open their first-round, best-of-five Stanley Cup series in Montreal with the longest game in NHL history. After 116 minutes and 30 seconds of play, Mud Bruneteau of Detroit finally scores on a pass from Hec Kilrea at 2:20 A.M. (on March 25) for a 1-0 victory. The goal comes in the sixth overtime, and the two teams are just 3 minutes and 30 seconds shy of playing the equivalent of three full games. Red Wings goaltender Norm Smith is credited with the longest shutout performance in NHL history. Detroit wins the next two games to sweep the series.

Birthdays:
George Sisler b. 1893
Alex Olmedo b. 1936
Peyton Manning b. 1976
T.J. Ford b. 1983
Chris Bosh b. 1984

Packers Fact:
2008 seventh-round draft pick Brett Swain opened the 2009 season on the active roster after spending his rookie year on the practice squad.

ON YOU CAN’T?

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You can’t canvass public opinion with a simple yes or no, because you will get the answer you do not expect.

Tauranga City (New Zealand) councillor Bill Faulkner (thanks to Brad Gillon)

“He was a bold man that first eat an oyster.”

—JONATHAN SWIFT, Anglo-Irish satirist

READ IT AND WEEP

Now that we’ve had a couple of years to settle into our new lives of lowered expectations and downsized dreams, it might be a good time to let a whipcrack financial journalist take you back on the journey into the intricate clockworks of the catastrophe of 2009. As one president was going out and another era beginning, the “Morgan Mafia” and the rest of the shadow banking world were trying to stuff the evil genies of greed and toxic assets back into the bottle, to no avail. A brilliant and chilling inside look into events that are still reverberating.

FOOL’S GOLD: HOW THE BOLD DREAM OF A SMALL TRIBE AT J. P. MORGAN WAS CORRUPTED BY WALL STREET GREED AND UNLEASHED A CATASTROPHE, by Gillian Tett (Free Press, 2009)