Friday Snippets and Soundbites

The ec team will be celebrating Christmas with our coworkers today, but we couldn't leave you hanging without this week's edition of "Snippets and Soundbites." As always, if this bit of randomness isn't enough for you, check out page 38 of the December (and every month's ) issue of ec.

Ready to get your Friday off to a good start? Let's go!

You're never too old.
It doesn't matter to former hockey great Vyacheslav Fetisov that the last time he played professionally was more than 10 years ago. Today, he'll take to the ice again as an defenseman for his former club, CSKA Moscow. He's 50 years old and signed a provisional contract and passed a medical examination in order to play professionally again. Fetisov won two Olympic medals and seven world titles in the 1970s and ’80s as a member of the Soviet Union's national team. He later joined the CSKA Moscow club before joining the NHL's New Jersey Devils in 1989. He later became a Detroit Redwing and retired after helping them win a second Stanley Cup in 1998. Fetisov was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2001. Fetisov says he's rejoining his former team after they lost several defensemen to injury. To learn more about Fetisov's return, go here.

Light the fire. 

For more than 200 years, residents of the River Parish in Louisiana have been building two story bonfires along the banks of the Mississippi River. No one's really sure how the tradition began, but residents of Paulina, La., and the surrounding areas weren't very happy when federal and local officials told them they probably couldn't light the fires this year because of the swollen nature of the river. But recently, the residents received word that the river had gone down the the bonfires were a go. So, by Christmas Eve, residents will have built more than 100 bonfires atop the river levees along a 4-mile stretch of riverfront from Gramercy to Paulina, La. Traditionally, on Christmas Eve when they burn the bonfires, homeowners along the levees open their homes and feed passersby bowls of homemade gumbo, jambalaya and corn soup. At midnight, everyone heads down the road to midnight Mass at St. Joseph's Catholic Church. To learn more about the tradition, go here.

Secret agent man. . . .or not. 

A German man's claim that he was a secret agent didn't carry any weight with the German police men who had followed him in a high-speed chase complete with flashing lights. The man had raced past officers, sped through a red light, and ignored signals to pull over as the police followed him. Once the police did manage to stop the car, the man whispered that he was "one of them" and suggested that he was on a secret mission and belonged to the Federal Crime Office, an office similar to the FBI. A background check revealed no such thing. To learn more about this offbeat story, go here.