Sports Fact & Book Rec of the Day 8/6-7/2011

8/6/1926:
Eighteen-year-old New Yorker Gertrude Ederle becomes the first women to swim the English Channel, covering the 21 miles from Cap Gris-Nez in France to Kingsdown on the English coast in little more than 14-1/2 hours. Only five men accomplished the feat before Ederle. The best time among the quintet was 16 hours and 39 minutes.

Birthdays:
Hank Iba b. 1904
Clem Labine b. 1926
Dale Ellis b. 1960
Tony Fernandez b. 1962
David Robinson b. 1965

Packers Fact:
With 1,012 yards in 2002, Donald Driver set a franchise record with his sixth 1,000-yard pass-catching season. Two other Packers had five such seasons: James Lofton and Sterling Sharpe.

Hollywood icon and baseball fan Humphrey Bogart: "A hot dog at the ballpark is better than a steak at the Ritz."

Birthdays:
Don Larson b. 1929
Abebe Bikila b. 1932
Carlos Monson b. 1942
Alan Page b. 1945
Sidney Crosby b. 1967

ON AND THE OBVIOUS
QUESTION IS NO

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So the obvious answer is Why?

newscaster John Humphrys

ON INSTRUCTIONS,
DIFFICULT-TO-FOLLOW

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Could you get a little closer apart?

film director Michael Curtiz, to two stars

“A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”

—ERNEST HEMINGWAY, American writer

“Beware of rashness, but with energy, and sleepless vigilance, go forward and give us victories.”

—ABRAHAM LINCOLN, U.S. president

RAVE REVIEWS

In July 1950 Corporal Robert Leavitt is in a tunnel in Korea, pinned down by friendly fire and wondering how he’s going to get out alive. In July 1959 Leavitt’s physically and mentally disabled nine-year-old son, Termite, is in West Virginia being cared for by his half-sister, Lark, and his aunt Nonie. Aunt Nonie is a woman of few resources and much stress, and Social Services threatens to take Termite away and break up the family. We wonder what has happened to Termite’s parents. Jayne Anne Phillips reveals this family’s “tangled secrets in such a profound and intimate way that these ordinary, wounded people become both tragic and magnificent,” Ron Charles writes in The Washington Post Book World.

LARK AND TERMITE, by Jayne Anne Phillips (Knopf, 2009)