Number Six: I have a choice?
Number Two: Of course. You can do as you want.
Number Six: As long as it’s what you want.
Number Two: As long as it is what the majority wants. We’re democratic. In some ways.
“Dance of the Dead” — The Prisoner (1967)
One of the players for the Dragons came round to the penalty box to put in a request for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” which I must confess that I was rather shocked that it wasn’t on the iPad.
Or indeed any Skynyrd which is even more surprising and a state of affairs I can only ascribe to just not thinking of them when it came time to score some more tunes for the iPod.
Fortunately, that was a problem that was easily rectified and tonight we were able to make at least one loyal listener happy during the first Zamboni run prior to the warmups and the first game! A happy bonus was a little “Sweet Home Alabama” which actually got played twice as the official MCHL playlist also has a remixed version of that song which hit the speakers during a stoppage in play.
We do rather like our audience and when they’re happy, we’re happy as well! 🙂
Nicholas decided to make the session more interesting by giving up his referee’s stripes and power to shamelessly abuse his position of authority in favour of skating as a substitute forward in both of the Ironclad games to prepare himself for playing outside the crease during his regular beer league game against the Micro-Dekes.
What he didn’t know was that I had made it clear to his referee colleagues that I wouldn’t be opposed to his activities on ice getting a strict interpretation of the rules and was happily rewarded when he got bundled off to the sin bin for slashing (and it wasn’t like it was borderline…he truly earned that two minutes of feeling shame!).
I’ll confess to a bit of a guilty pleasure dialing in player #10 for two minutes on the scoreboard.
Prior to that, I wasn’t totally committed to the tunes I was going to spin during the Zamboni intermission between the games.
That penalty certainly decided the matter and the referee who nailed him got two tracks of his favourite artist Poppy which turned out to be a noticeably longer set with a few extra of her songs due to some delays with the Zamboni driver training up a new gent.
In the second game, Nicholas was rewarded with a beautiful bar-down empty netter in the closing minutes of the game and then was about one inch away from a second empty net goal were it not for the post deflecting that puck harmlessly to the corner.
So he got penalised and also got on the scoresheet and on balance that seems a good night to me.
Being able to make one player’s evening and resulting thumbs up from across the rink as he was waiting to take the ice and generally just loving spinning the tunes was a very happy bonus! 🙂
