On Fox News, Tebow's 7-1 record this year is just the latest reason to attack a liberal straw man. "Tim Tebow's success as the quarterback of the Denver Broncos has done little to silence his critics, who believe that his faith in Jesus Christ has no business on the football field," writes Todd Starnes. "It doesn't matter how many touchdown passes he throws or how many games he wins because Tebow will always be a lightning rod for anti-Christian bigots."

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With the purpose of clarifying the issues, I'm going to do an instant replay on the questions and help Surma with the answers. (The following questions were taken right off the CNN telecast.)

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People from Texas understood what he meant; it was like when the University of Texas played Texas A&M or Oklahoma. To Oklahomans, it was like when their Sooners play Texas or Nebraska. People from Michigan and Ohio understood -- it was like when Michigan played Ohio State, and they had to pass out fliers to fans of the visiting team advising “Wear jackets over your team colors and don’t take them off until seated.” (The same flier suggested driving across the state line in a rental car with neutral-state license plates.)

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Like Mays’ over-the-shoulder catch, Buckner’s booboo is entrenched in American folklore. Jimmy Fallon’s Red Sox fanatic in “Fever Pitch,” distraught over breaking up with his girlfriend, watches Buckner’s play over and over on his VCR. During congressional hearings in 2008, U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., called former Treasury Secretary John Snow, then-SEC chief Christopher Cox and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan “three Bill Buckners.” On “Curb Your Enthusiasm” this season, Larry David loses a softball game when a ball rolls between his legs; his coach screams, “You Buckner-ed me!”

Everyone knows that Buckner lost the 1986 World Series for the Red Sox. But what everyone knows is wrong.

At the time, the Red Sox were burdened with 68 years of frustration; their last championship was in 1918. Leading three games to two against the New York Mets, Boston was ahead by a score of 5-3 in the bottom of the 10th inning. Red Sox pitcher Calvin Schiraldi got two quick outs. In the Sox locker room the champagne was iced, and the scoreboard flashed “Congratulations Red Sox.”

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But it wasn't a good city for big-time sports, not as the 1970s began, unless you just wanted to place a bet. There were no professional baseball, football or basketball teams for the locals to rally around. Then, in 1973, Coach Jerry Tarkanian came to the Runnin’ Rebels basketball team. As a new HBO documentary,"Runnin' Rebels of UNLV," explains, the University of Las Vegas, the city itself and college basketball would never be quite the same again.

"In the late 1970s," says comedian and talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, who grew up in Las Vegas, "I was in seventh or eighth grade and the Rebels were in the top 10 in the nation, and I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is unbelievable.’ We didn’t have anything like that. We didn’t have an athlete to rally around.

"The Rebels were showtime before the Lakers were showtime."

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The image was reinforced by his work as the founder of Black Lizard Press in Berkeley, Calif., where he reprinted dozens of crime novels by 1950s drugstore book-rack legends such as Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Charles Willeford. More than two decades later, Gifford has succeeded in shedding the reputation of crime writer -- something he never aspired to in the first place -- without acquiring a new one.

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I'm not going to pretend that I've read everything or even most of what has been written about McCartney; from what I have read, Sounes' book is easily the best. For one thing, he can write. He has published serviceable biographies of Bob Dylan ("Down the Highway") and Charles Bukowski ("Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life") as well as "The Wicked Game: Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and the Story of Modern Golf." For another, Sounes has a proper appreciation of how much sleaze is needed in a book about any pop idol; I would bet that the number of pages given to McCartney's flings with mistresses and groupies trumps those in all other bios combined. (And believe me, when you're fighting your way through countless thousands of words on interpretations of song lyrics and record sales, the sex is a much-needed break.) Finally, "Fab" is, unlike some other McCartney books, entirely unauthorized, yet another thing working in its favor.

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Jane Leavy, author of a superb baseball novel, "Squeeze Play," and the best-selling "Sandy Koufax, A Lefty’s Legacy," zooms right in on the essence of Mantle's appeal in "The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood." He was the last boy in the last decade ruled by boys. He was L'il Abner in a posse of dreamy reprobates: James Dean, Buddy Holly, Frankie Avalon, Dean Martin, Elvis. Women wanted to have them or mother them, young men aped them, while behind the scenes, elders and handlers tried to tame them."

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What exactly is the point? Is the author, Andrew Morton, trying to tell us that he is approaching the phenomenon of Jolie from a different perspective? If so, he is deluding himself and trying to delude us. The cover of Angelina makes it appear to be a novel, and on closer inspection, that's what it proves to be: a fictional account of an actual life.

Morton, his dust jacket informs us, wrote a "groundbreaking 1992 biography" of Princess Diana as well as books on Monica Lewinsky and Tom Cruise; I haven't read any of them, but judging from "Angelina," he has written more biographies than he's read. In his acknowledgments, Morton writes, "For the most part, I have relied on original research and interviews with contemporaries, or at the very least tried to place Angelina Jolie's own words in a coherent framework." The last part shouldn't be all that difficult since Jolie has been about the most accessible celebrity in the world over the last 10 years and is usually a great deal more coherent on her life than Morton is.

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By the end of this season, Rodriquez will probably have passed up Sammy Sosa (number six at 609) and moved in just behind Ken Griffey, Jr. (630) on the all-time list. I can only imagine the bad taste it's going to leave in the mouths of veteran New York sportswriters when late next season he starts to approach number four, the sainted Willie Mays (660). From there, it will probably just be a matter of time before A-Rod passes up Babe Ruth (714), Henry Aaron (755) and even Barry Bonds (762).

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Everyone from ESPN to Sports Illustrated has proclaimed this "the Year of the Pitcher," and when you consider the highlights, it's hard to disagree.

As Major League Baseball cruised into its midseason All-Star Game this week, there had already been four no-hitters, two of them perfect games, by the Oakland A's Dallas Braden on May 9 and the Philadelphia Phillies' Roy Halladay on May 29. If not for an infamous call at first base by umpire Jim Joyce while the Detroit Tigers' Armando Galarraga was on the mound, there would have been an incredible three perfect games and five no-hitters through just the first four months of the season.

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The book certainly isn't an autobiography. His icon, George Orwell, said that "Autobiography is not to be trusted unless it reveals something disgraceful," and Hitchens fails to mention that his first wife was pregnant with his child when he left her. In fact, there is barely any mention of his three children, only a passing mention of his current wife, and none at all of his younger brother, Peter, a right-wing columnist in England.

If you're interested in Hitchens trivia, "Hitch 22" is loaded. The favorite "good-bad book" (to use G.K. Chesterton's phrase) of his youth was "How Green Was My Valley." He is part Jewish (on his mother's side); she wanted him to be "an English gentleman." His father, a military man, was known as "The Commander." His "literary hero" is Borges, he thinks Costa-Gavras' "Z" is "the greatest of all sixties movies."

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"If you're over 30, you know where you were on that night in 1980," said NBC's Mike Emrick. I certainly remember where I was. I was watching "Saturday Night Live" when the host, Elliott Gould, came out at the beginning of the show and announced to the crowd that we had beaten the Russians. That was my first indication that we were even playing the Russians.

So, granted, I'm not the most knowledgeable writer one could pick to cover hockey, a sport that I once called "God's gift to white boys with no athletic talent," but then I'm precisely that demographic NBC was trying to attract. And, honestly, after some effort, I think I did figure out hockey pretty good.

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Canadians, Costas mused, have always displayed an ability to laugh at themselves -- a quality sorely lacking in some of their neighbors. At least the humor seemed intentional; why else you would ask William Shatner to speak to a worldwide audience on "What It Means to be Canadian."

"You have to dream big," he said solemnly, "in a land that is the final frontier."

Canadians are not big on sarcasm -- as a Canadian actor on "30 Rock" recently explained it, "We have a small Jewish population" -- but there's a limit to even Canadian politeness. It's the first time I've ever heard 60,000 people guffaw.

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By now, readers of Hemon's three previous books --  "The Question of Bruno" (2000), "Nowhere Man" (2002) and "The Lazarus Project" (2008) -- know his story. Born in Sarajevo, he came to the U.S. in 1992 at age 28 on a cultural visa and, scheduled to return home to Bosnia, found that the Yugoslav army was bombarding his homeland. Hemon was granted political asylum and chose to live in Chicago, supporting himself with various jobs that ranged from dishwashing to private detective work. He learned English, he told interviewers, by making lists of words from Nabokov novels and began writing English only three years after he began to study it.

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 The press jumped on last week's leaks from the book alleging that, among other things, Rodriguez is supposed to have used steroids as a teenager; the source for that -- the only source -- is Jose Canseco, who says, "I think probably so." (The Dodgers' Doug Mientkiewicz, who knew Rodriguez all through high school, told the Los Angeles Times that the story is nonsense and that "It would be 99.9% impossible for us not to know." )

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Barry has shown a dazzling facility with poetry, drama and fiction -- his works form a mosaic-like whole, though each stands on its own. He never uses a fancy word when a simple one will do; his characters speak a plain vocabulary, but in cadences tempered and honed into poetry. Roseanne McNulty, his heroine in his new novel, "The Secret Scripture," tells us: "I am completely alone. There is no one in the world that knows me now outside of this place, all my own people, the few farthings of them that once were, my little wren of a mother ... they are all gone now." Roseanne, who has been hiding her memoirs under a floorboard at the Rosscommon Regional Mental Hospital for more than half a century, regards herself as "a thing left over ... a scraggy stretch of skin and bone in a bleak skirt and blouse, and a canvas jacket, and I sit here in my niche like a songless robin -- no, like a mouse that died under the hearth stone where it was warm, and lies now like a mummy in the pyramids ... No one even knows I have a story."

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For those who missed it, the basic facts of Némirovsky's story are that she was born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of a Jewish banker from the Ukraine. In 1919 her family left St. Petersburg for Paris, and in 1929 her first novel, "David Golder," was published. Its success was immediate; in 1930 it was made into a film by Julien Duvivier. None of her subsequent work equaled the success of "Golder" (though her novel "Jezabel" was published in the U.S. in 1937 under the title "A Modern Jezebel"). In 1939, Némirovsky converted to Roman Catholicism and, with her husband, Michael Epstein, applied for French citizenship, which was refused. By 1940 both she and Epstein, a banker, were denied the right to work, and, with the approach of the Wehrmacht on Paris, they fled with their two young daughters to the village of Issi I'Eveque in the south of France. In the summer of 1942, Irène and Michael were arrested and eventually sent to Auschwitz. Némirovsky died of typhus a short time later, and her husband was sent to a gas chamber.

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Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Lonesome Dove" fits, though somewhat uneasily, into the latter category. McMurty's two greatest characters, the grizzled Texas Rangers Woodrow Call and Gus McCrae, lament the passing of their Wild West and try to reclaim their youth with a cattle drive. What elevated McMurtry's novel over countless pulps with similar sentiments was its insistence on telling a heroic saga without the haze of romantic myth. Or, as he explained in his memoir "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen" (1999), he wanted "Lonesome Dove" to "demythicize the West." Instead, he thought the book "became a kind of American Arthuriad," reinforcing the very notions that he had set out to subvert.

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