Sports Fact & Book Rec of the Day 4/2/2011

4/2/2001:
The Seattle Mariners open the season with a 5-4 win over the Oakland Athletics at Safeco Field. They'll go on to post a record of 116-46, tying the mark for most regular-season wins established by the 1906 Cubs, who were 116-36. The Mariners won't reach the World Series, however, they'll lose the American League Championship Series to the New York Yankees, four games to one.

Birthdays:
Luke Appling b. 1907
Carmen Basillo b. 1927 (Wikipedia says he was born in July, so I dunno)
Dick Radatz b. 1937
Don Sutton b. 195
Linford Christie b. 1960

Packers Fact:
Defensive end Johnny Jolly blocked a field-goal try to jump-start a 36-17 victory over St. Louis in Week 3 of 2009. He swatted Josh Brown's 48-yard attempt on the game's first possession.

ON CAKE INGREDIENTS,
NOT THAT APPETIZING
TO US

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Sugar, bleached whole wheat flour, soybean oil . . . salt, whole eggs, butt water, topped with coarse sugar

from an ingredients label on a cake (which was supposed to say “butter, water”)

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.”

—HELEN KELLER, American writer and lecturer

GIFT IDEA

“We had faces then,” Norma Desmond observed in Sunset Boulevard. And they did. You can see them in this great collection gathered from the Library of Congress—not only faces, but posters, movie stills, and promo materials. Peter Kobel uses it all to show us the history of the movie business from 1893 to 1927. The New York Daily News calls this book “the definitive visual history of silent film.”

SILENT MOVIES: THE BIRTH OF FILM AND THE TRIUMPH OF MOVIE CULTURE, by Peter Kobel (Little, Brown, 2007)