Quillblog would like to congratulate the Toronto Star‘s Cathal Kelly for possibly being the first sportswriter ever to work an Oulipo reference into a soccer-game recap. Covering the Toronto club’s game against the L.A. Galaxy on the weekend, Kelly wrote:

The French prankster Georges Perec once wrote a 300-page novel without using the letter “e.”

The book – A Void in English translation – is a nifty detective story. But despite its literary merits, most of your time as a reader is spent going backward over each page making sure that missing letter really is missing.

Let’s call you-know-who the absent vowel of last night’s Toronto FC-L.A. Galaxy game. Everyone knew he wasn’t going to play. Wouldn’t even dress. But they were still falling all over themselves for a look at him.

Now if the lead story in the “Wheels” section would just open with an allusion to Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, Quillblog could die happy.