Sorry, Al; Sorry, Dude

This lead is more of an Al Penwasser or Simple Dude gig, and I had to "build my own" since I didn't have the camera with me.  Still, the irony was too much to pass up.  A pickup truck passed us on the way home from work tonight.  The door was emblazoned with something like this:

OFFICIAL USE ONLY

                       U.S. GOVERNMENT

DEPT OF INTERIOR

NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

And the irony comes with the sticker on the tailgate, which was in the neighborhood of this:

Rage against the machine??? YOU ARE THE MACHINE, FOOL!!!


___________________________________________________

Alrighty, now I'll tuck in the latest Lokomotiv report.  The last tune up for the outdoor game (more on this later) was this morning in Angarsk, where 6,104 fans (who hadn't seen their team play Yaroslavl since 1967) watched a scoreless first period.  Halfway through the second, Oleg Yashin netted his 11th to give the visiting good guys a 1-0 lead.

Then, mysteriously, the roof caved in.

In a 1:13 stretch starting at 12:30 of the second, Ermak got goals from Pahudin Gimbatov, Maxim Yushkov, and Anton Nikonorov to blow out to a 3-1 lead and send Nikolai Lozhkin to the showers early.  The two teams traded goals in the third, with Denis Ignashin pushing the score to 4-1 a half-minute into the period, and Emil Galimov scoring on a penalty shot at 13:09.  But the story here was Ermak goalie Andrei Gavrilov.  He held firm despite Lokomotiv outshooting the home team 26-9 in the third and 51-26 overall.  Not a good outing for us, but a nice win for Ermak, whose coach Alex Zhdahin was celebrating his birthday as well.


The last preparations were finished on beautiful Central Stadium, situated on Holiday Island smack in the middle of the Yenisey River in lovely downtown Krasnoyarsk.

The venue has seating for 22,500, and word is that 17,000 of those tickets are sold.  Now, having a stadium in the middle of a river has its downsides, as the Soviets learned here in 1966:

But fear not, as daytime temperatures for gametime are supposed to be 10 degrees F.  Not the warmest of days, but beats the hell out of the 35 below a week or so ago, and I am told of an old Russian saying that goes,  "A true Siberian is not the one who isn't afraid of cold, but the one who dresses right".

Finally, on the VHL website they had a neat little poll about the game.  "What do you expect to find at the Russian Classic?"  43.44% chose "spectactular hockey"; 25.35% went with "record attendance"; 15.24 % were hoping to get the keys to a Toyota being given away; 12.13% wisely chose "frosty weather"; and a puzzling (to me) 3.84 % chose "hot drinks".  I guess vodka doesn't count as a hot drink, eh?