Odds & Ends

I noticed in the paper today that of the top six vote-getters in the NBA sportsmanship award, three were Duke alumni: Luol Deng, this year's winner, Shane Battier, and Elton Brand, who won last year. In 2004-2005, Grant Hill won.

The Comoros have had 19 coups since gaining independence from France in 1975. That's an average reign of about 20 months.

The most recent two P.G. Wodehouse novels I've read, Something Fresh (1915) and Mike and Psmith (1909), share a striking number of similarities. Plotwise, both hinge on a break-in scene at night in which the perpetrator, our hero, knocks over a can of paint while creeping about where he shouldn't be at such an hour. The protagonist is not actually guilty of the accusation leveled against him in either book, each time by an insanely determined self-appointed detective. The detective finds the paint-stained shoe, but in each book a loyal companion of the protagonist absconds with the shoe just before it's shown to the main authority figure. In each novel, the amateur sleuth compares himself to Doctor Watson, and Wodehouse even reuses at least one paragraph almost verbatim, though the whole ordeal is very similar. There's also a reused passage regarding the old adage which goes, "Early to bed, early to rise, ..." I wonder if there are more connections to be found within his work.