Another Saturday night...

...and if you bear with me, I'll have some more pictures for your viewing pleasure.  But first, I shall bore you with hockey.

In today's matches, we saw Tappara win their way into the Finnish finals; however, Jyvaskyla won a 2-1 OT game to stay alive at 3 games to one down to Assat.

Bern survived a 3-goal second period rally to down Fribourg 4-3 and take a 2-0 lead in the Swiss finals.

Lulea got a 2-1 OT win over Farjestads to win their Swedish semifinal and move on to face Skelleftea in the finals.

In Norway, Stavenger rolled over Valerenga 4-1 to take a 2-1 lead in their final series.

In France, Rouen rallied for a 3-1 win over Angers, setting up a final game seven on Tuesday.

And in the UK, Belfast's Craig Peacock had two goals and an assist to top Coventry 5-1 and advance to the winner take all EIHL championship game.  They'll face Nottingham tomorrow, after Canadian Bruce Graham had a hat trick in their 6-3 win over Cardiff.

Which got me thinking about the different nationalities scattered across the various leagues.  I looked up the top ten scorers in each of the leagues I follow (including the NHL).  Canadians took 64 of those spots.  Czechs had 16, but that was skewed by having all ten spots in their own league.  Slovaks made 13, nine of them in their league, followed by Sweden with 12, USA with 10, Finland with 9, Russia-surprisingly- with only 8, Poland with 6 (all in their league), Italy with 4, Norway, Switzerland, Germany, and Denmark with three, South Korea and Japan (Asia League) with 2 each, and one each from Latvia (in Germany) and Hungary (in France).  Canadians were the leading goal scorers in 9 of the leagues.  The other interesting (to me) thing was a result of the NHL lockout.  The NY Islanders' John Tavares finished in the Swiss top ten- and is currently in the NHL's top ten!


Okay, here's some pictures!

Here's a still taken before the video last night.

Down the street this morning.

 

Noisy blackbird along the canal trail.

Yeah, we crossed this.  Well, at least I did... somebody thought it was better to go through six inches of water and muck and try to pull his daddy into it.