From Russia.(The Talk of the Town)(Laurie Carr; hockey enthusiast)

Jaromir Jagr has gone to Siberia, for a wagonload of petrodollars. Jagr, a Czech, was the captain and leading scorer last season of the New York Rangers, Manhattan's most exalted hockey team. Now he wears No. 68 for the team Avangard Omsk, a gift from life for Laurie Carr, a Web developer who lives in Mine Hill, New Jersey, and runs BeyondtheBlueshirts, a Web site on which, from her living-room sofa, she translates daily hockey reports from the Russian press. Specifically, she follows Russian, European, and North American Ranger prospects, as well as former and current players. Carr, who is thirty-five, started the site in July, and her first big story was Jagr's being courted and then signed by the Russian league, to which sportswriters frequently attach the word "upstart," since this is its first season, and it hopes, with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's support, to supplant the N.H.L. (A more sombre story involving Omsk broke in the middle of October, when a nineteen-year-old named Alexei Cherepanov, the Rangers' first draft pick in 2007, collapsed while sitting next to Jagr on the bench, and died of heart failure.)

Carr and her husband, Jeremy, who is British, hold season tickets for the Rangers. One evening recently, before a game, Carr, who has brown hair and wide-set blue eyes, sat on a bench outside a Holiday Inn Express on West Twenty-ninth Street, near the Garden, while Ranger fans, some of them carrying jerseys over their arms like vestments, went past. She said that she had begun her site as a means of improving her Russian. She grew up in New Jersey, with a father whose ancestors were Ukrainian and who followed the Rangers. Somewhat eccentrically, Carr felt oppressed by the vestiges of the Cold War. "I was alternately fascinated and frightened to death that I was going to wake up one day and the whole world was going to end, because Russia and America would launch missiles at each other," she said. She began to read avidly about Russia and Russian culture. In high school, she bought some "try-and-learn-it-at-home tapes to teach myself Russian, but it wasn't until college that I really studied it," she said. She took four years of Russian at Drew University and spent a few weeks in Russia on a school-sponsored tour, ...