This is so strange I can barely believe it...

From Czechs turn hockey gold into opera

PRAGUE -- The Olympic champion Czech Republic hockey team is getting a curtain call. Dominik Hasek, Jaromir Jagr and the rest of the 1998 gold-medal winning hockey team are the subjects of a new opera that re-enacts their victory at the Nagano Olympics.

"Nagano," billed as "an opera in three periods and one overtime," is the first Czech opera about a sports event.

Characters include Hasek, Jagr, Robert Reichel and Martin Rucinsky as well as Vaclav Havel, the former anti-communist dissident-turned- Czech president.

The opera, based on a script written by Jaroslav Dusek, follows the final stages of the Czech team's Olympic run and the celebrations afterward, during which a chorus of fans yell Hasek is God and Hasek for president.

The Czechs defeated the United States and Canada before beating arch-rival Russia to win their first Olympic title.

Short on sleep. Again. Had excellent laundry misadventures, starting with being so absorbed in reading THN as I walked to the laundromat that I walked right into a parking meter. Got briefly irritated that whatever it was I walked into was hard and bruisy and wasn't moving out of the way. Realized it was a parking meter and wasn't going anywhere. Giggled at myself and went back to reading THN.

Had revelation at laundromat that now I can do more than one load of laundry in one trip because of multiple washers and dryers! Just need to get a big enough laundry bag to fit everything into.

Had interesting time trying to communicate with guy at laundromat. He couldn't speak English, and I can kind of speak Cantonese well enough to trick people into thinking that I can like, understand it beyond the level of a 2-year-old, which I can't really. I'm sure he shared lots of valuable laundromat lore, but it was all wasted on me. I did manage to decipher that 1) I was using the crappier washer and 2) I put too much time on the dryer.