i do think that there is a small part of ilya that during the terrible ottawa years thinks about how if he did die then he and shane would have this epic tragic romance solidified in amber for the ages like via the virtue of some random hockey player's country workout playlist he learns about gram parsons and emmylou harris and hears the emmylou quote about realizing she loved gram but wanting to wait to tell him in person and then he oded before she could and he has a sick fantasy of if he killed himself and right before shane realized that he wanted to go public and say screw the mhl and actually be together but he wanted to wait to tell ilya in person but never got the chance and so shane just had to hold that knowledge that he could've had ilya with him if he just changed his mind earlier or called him to tell him and one day shane would tell the world this and people would go how tragic! how terrible! rozanov could still be here if they could have actually been together! but ilya knows this is terrible and horrible despite the warm satisfaction he gets from thinking about it and he mentions it to galina one time right before the end of a session with his hand on the doorknob and she make him schedule another hour the next day
i do think ilya would flourish as a failed twitch streamer who is clearly in psychiatric crisis hitting the bong (synthetic weed) in a polyester maid outfit while sucking shit at GTA
Yeah okay there are like 11 species of heron native to the USA and yes fine I’ve only managed to spot 10 of those species. You might think I’m bitter about that one species evading me but I’m not. I’m actually the Least Bittern person about it in the entire world
i love how weird kids are. they make up the most bizarre stuff when left to their own devices and it's never what an adult would naively predict a kid would do in their imaginative play
my friend's 5 year old recently got a toy veterinary medicine set - it's super cool, like one of those mini play kitchens a lot of kids have, but it's set up to pretend to be a vet (it's this thing) - it has stuffed animals and things to weigh them, give them medicine, take x-rays, write on their charts, etc.
so this kid, who is five and to my knowledge has no experience in the administrative bureaucracy of modern healthcare, puts a stuffed pig named Piggy on the exam table. she pretends to draw blood from Piggy using a fake syringe, and the blood goes into a toy test tube vial that she calls "the resulter"
i'm playing with her, right, so i'm like, awesome, what are the results of Piggy's blood test? and she says "we have to send it to the scientists." so we send the vial to the scientists (put it in her bedroom) and when we get back to the vet playset i'm like awesome what did the scientists say? and she says they have not gotten back to us yet
so she rolls her eyes, exasperated, and says we have to call the scientists. she pretends to call them. apparently, they tell her that Piggy's blood test is "at the bottom of the list" and "we have to WAIT." she frowns. we wait a bit longer and call them back. they tell us it will be a while! she says we should go ask the scientists in person so we go back to her bedroom and she inquires at this imaginary lab, at which point the scientists yell at her and tell her now they will make us wait even longer!
keep in mind she is 100% directing this play. she is making all this up. she is fully in control of this game, and she has decided that what we are going to pretend is that we are dealing with this exhausting nonsense, not actually treating Piggy.
finally the blood tests come back. they are inconclusive. the scientists do not know what is wrong with Piggy. the little girl walks back to the stuffed pig on the exam table, sighs deeply, and says in a very serious voice "we can never help you."
i'm obsessed with this kid. when given complete control over a make believe scenario, instead of becoming the heroic rescuer administering effective cures, she is instead a beleaguered vet making multiple calls to an overworked lab only to be left unable to help her patient.
Very short (and blind) dachshund/terrier mix. Was very excited to leave but couldn't figure out where the door was exactly. Knew the approximate location so he just stood at the window directly next to the door.
Small Chihuahua mix exactly one apple tall. Walked like she was on parade with very big steppies.
Fluffy maltese mix who gravely accepted a treat from a vet tech but didn't eat it. Just wanted to hold it for a while.
Beautiful Belgian sheepdog who splayed on the floor like a bearskin rug. Flattest dog. Did not give a shit about the world's angriest terrier across the room who was highly offended.
World's angriest terrier who got half the waiting room to himself. Sat on his owner's lap and growled at everything but especially the Belgian sheepdog who, I can't stress enough, did not react.
Malinois mix -- young, under a year, and doing her best to study how doorknobs work sp she could plot an escape. Accompanied by a small (20 pounds) cattle dog mix who DID escape by simply slipping her leash.
Cattle dog (?) mix who briefly got to explore the wonders of the parking lot but was very friendly. She was happy enough to follow me as long as I knelt down and called her every few steps.
kinda need a hangover-esque au where the raider's 2014 cup win coincides with ilya's 22nd birthday so the team parties in vegas and connors, marleau and ilya wake up in a hotel room they did not book with no memory of last night a baby in the bathroom an exotic bird eating bar peanuts out of ilya's designer jeans and 34 angry omnious texts that ilya can't figure out the context of from shane
Ilya slowly blinks into consciousness. His head is pounding. He sits up, and realizes that he'd fallen asleep on the floor, with a woman's underwear stuck to his right cheek. Ilya peels it off, makes an interested face when he also realizes its sticky, and tries to survey the damage from last night.
The first thought he has is this is not my hotel room.
Connors is already up, fully dressed and anxiously pacing back and forth. He seems to be distressed about something in the bathroom, shouting unintelligibly, English too panicked and incoherent for Ilya to make out what he's saying. Marleau is still facedown, also on the floor, completely naked.
Ilya looks down. Miraculously, he has clothes on. They are not, however, the clothes he started the night in. He's 99% sure he's wearing a woman's crop top. And women's pajama shorts. He's also fairly sure they are bedazzled on the butt.
"Guys! Wake the fuck up!" Connors shouts again.
Ilya starts feeling his way around the floor for his clothes, phone, and wallet. His search gets him to peek up from the suite's coffee table, which brings into view a gorgeous exotic bird, almost as tall as the men in the room, voraciously eating something from Ilya's jeans, which hang suspended on the hotel's chandelier.
To put it bluntly, the room is trashed. Furniture that isn't broken is overturned to its side. Strange stains that smell alcoholic in nature pervade the hotel floor. Women's thongs, bras, and other undergarments scatter themselves all across the room, with their owners nowhere in sight.
Ilya walks up to the exotic bird. The bird stops his eating, turns a yellow, predatory eye in Ilya's direction. Ilya pets the bird once, twice, and then spots his phone hanging out of his back pocket, to his relief. Ilya fishes it out of the air, and finds a charger conveniently strewn to the side. He plugs his phone in. He leaves the bird so it can keep eating at his jeans.
While he waits for his phone to power up, he walks over, nudges Marleau in the ribs. "Wake up," Ilya orders. Marly groans. Ilya nudges him again. "Captain's orders," he says, deadly serious.
Marly, on command, slowly comes to.
"Jesus fuck, what happened last night?" Marly groans. He realizes he's not wearing any clothes, looks at Ilya, then shrugs. He then checks the ceiling, at the chandelier, and the bird stretching its long magnificent neck to feast on Ilya's designer jeans. "Yo, who's bird is that?"
"We can worry about the bird later!" Connors shouts, flying back in from the bathroom. "We are three grown men with a fucking baby that isn't ours in our bathtub! We are going to get arrested if we don't identify who it is right now!"
Ilya and Marly make eye contact with each other, making a face, before joining Connors to head back into the bathroom. Ilya almost trips and falls on an empty Svedka bottle that he kicks to the side with a disgusted sneer.
Three grown men peek over the edge of a bathtub. There is indeed a baby in there.
Well," Ilya says, cheerily. "It has brown eyes, so it cannot be mine."
"Is it like a dog situation?" Marly asks, genuine. "Where they like, come with identification tags?"
"Maybe we should take it to the police," Connors says. "And we leave out the fact that it was here all night surrounded by drugs and booze."
Ilya ignores both of them as he walks back into the suite's common room. His phone blinks to life--10 percent battery. It helpfully reminds him that his flight to Moscow is in 12 hours. Ilya swipes the notification away. He dials Svetlana's number.
She doesn't pick up. He calls again.
"Bluh," Svetlana answers.
"Where are you?" Ilya asks.
Shuffling. "Our hotel room?" Svetlana grumbles. "Where the fuck are you?"
Ilya switches to FaceTime. Svetlana picks up. She looks terrible.
"Look," Ilya orders. He swings his phone around the room. He holds for a couple more seconds on the bird, so Svetlana can get a good look at it. Svetlana hums appreciatively, so Ilya takes her into the bathroom.
"Hey Svetlana," his teammates chime. Svetlana grunts in greeting.
The three of them, plus digital Svetlana, peer over the bathtub.
"Do you guys remember anything from last night?" Ilya asks the room.
"Nothing," Connors says, despondent.
"Nothing," Marly confirms.
"Nothing," Svetlana says, cheerily. "I do know who's baby that is though."
All three of them swing their heads to Ilya's phone. "What?" Connor asks, hopefully.
Svetlana smirks. "Yeah, it's Marly's."
Silence. Then--"Fuck off Svetlana," Marly responds.
"No, I'm being deadass," she says, somber. "Marly married a stripper last night, and that's her baby."
Even more silence. Ilya, Connors, and Marly look at each other, stunned.
"You two shut the fuck up!" Marly orders. "I didn't marry anybody--"
Connors' face is white. "Marly, your hand."
They all look down. There's a cheap, chapel ring on his fourth finger. Ilya starts laughing so hard he almost falls over.
"Svetlana," Marly begs, desperate. With fatherhood on the line he's locked back into life. "Do you remember anything else from last night? Do you know how we got here?"
"Literally no," Svetlana says, already burying her face back into the hotel pillow. "I only remember you getting married because it was so fucking funny. Then, we got back in the limo, I blacked out, the next thing I knew I am back in my hotel room," she waggles her eyebrows. "Seems like you guys had fun without me though."
"Come over," Ilya demands. "Help us solve the mystery of the missing baby. We can get burritos after."
Svetlana laughs, indignant, "Fuck that. You guys are halfway across The Strip from me. You come here."
"We literally cannot leave this room," Connors says, panicked. "Until we absolve ourselves of all guilt for everything that happened here last night."
Ilya sighs, starting to get irritated. "This is not a big deal, okay?" Ilya says, to the room. "I wake up to worse when I party in Moscow. Fix is very simple. We talk to hotel, tell them we do not know where we are, they insist we pay for damage we pay damage and leave and someone comes in to clean everything up. We tell call girl service about Marly's wife and tell them we have her baby, we call police about bird, and I head to airport. Easy peezy, as you say in your country."
"You aren't curious about what happened?" Marly asks. "You don't want to find out how we got here?"
"What is there to find out?" Ilya says, easily. "We have fun fucking night on my birthday and we black out. Is price of doing business."
As he says this Ilya opens his phone, reads through more of his messages.
His heart sinks into his asshole when he sees 1 new message from one Jane.
To start, everything from their text thread has been wiped from his phone. This is horrible news to Ilya, whose nighttime ritual the past six months had been reading all of Hollander's messages, jerking off to the memories of when Hollander let him fuck him, before continuing to not reply to any of his correspondences.
Also, it means he has no explanation for the single text that remains in their conversation.
Jane: goodbye, rozanov.
Ilya hasn't responded to Hollander in over six months. Yet, this singular message is enough to get him type, panicked--
Ilya: lol wtf are you talking about
He hits send. The message doesn't go through. Ilya's heart starts pounding in his ears.
He does something desperate. He calls Hollander.
The call doesn't go through.
Ilya has pissed off enough hook ups to know exactly what this is.
Hollander's blocked him.
The little fucking asshole.
"We must retrace our steps," Ilya announces, out loud to the room. "Starting with pregame bar."
"Yo, are you serious Cap?" Marly asks, hopeful. Connors looks equally relieved that Ilya has decided to take charge of the situation.
"I'm going back to sleep," Svetlana says, definitive, and hangs up.
"Men," Ilya says gravely. He clutches his phone tightly in his hands. He's already brainstorming ways he will try to get back in contact with Hollander. "We need to solve the mystery of what the fuck happened at my 22nd birthday party."
Reminds me of the time we dared a brick oven pizza restaurant to make a pizza with so much garlic we couldn't finish it.
Boy did they deliver. The pizza had (no exaggeration) a solid inch of chopped garlic on top. It was fucking delicious. Multiple times we spotted restaurant workers peeking at us from the kitchen, with an obvious "my god they're actually eating it!" energy.
Of course we left a massive tip. Leaving the place we felt like triumphant Olympians gold-medaling the Pizza Event.
Only one problem.
This was a lunch time experience, and we worked at a small software development firm and there was a scheduled all-hands meeting after lunch. Our supervisor (politely) asked us to leave the meeting because we reeked of garlic.
i need everyone to get into college football right now i am dying to talk about the texas tech situation. this is the kind of thing that will be referenced for the next 100 years. there will be documentaries and biopics about this.
texas tech's quartback, brendan sorsby, was investigated for sports gambling. i know sports betting is all the rage right now, but athletes themselves are not allowed to do it. it is Rule Number 1 and it is the highest priority rule for the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), who governs all athletic programs at about 1,100 colleges in the US.
the invesitagetion of sorsby revealed that, not only did he place more than 9,000 sports bets when he himself was a collegiate athlete, but 40 of those bets were AGAINST HIS OWN TEAM when he was playing at indiana university. immediately, this threatens the integrity of the sport, and especially because indiana is the hottest team right now as the defending national champion.
the NCAA, which is largely a sham organization these days (they've truly lost their grasp and college athletics are the wild west now) actually enforced their Number 1 Rule and told sorsby his career is over, that he would never play college football again (and, subsequently, that he would never get drafted into the NFL because his college career was cut short).
well, because the NCAA is a husk of its former self, sorsby and texad tech immediately took this to court. MANY athletes have learned these past few seasons that if you can find a judge who's a fan of your team, you can get any NCAA ruling overturned. that's exactly what texas tech did. they filed a suit in Lubbock, where the university is located and where every judge is an alum of texas tech. so sorsby was granted an injunction and will now only be suspended for the first 2 games od the 2026 season (which are alwayd against no-name teams that will be destroyed regardless of who's suspended).
every other school in the country immediately went on the defensive because this is a very clear integretiy issue. so nebraska and georgia (sic em dawgs) released statements saying that all currently-scheduled competitions witb Texas Tech in ANY sport will be canceled and there will be no future schedulings. at least 3 of the major conferences (SEC, Big 10, Big 12) , who account for almost all division 1 sports teams in the country, are also in discussions about cancelling comtests. Texas Tech is part of the Big 12, and there is serious talk of all other teams in the conference shutting texas tech out.
now would probably be time where i say that texas tech is one of the wealthiest programs in college football becaise there is a single billionaire alumnus pouring money into the program with hopes of essentially buying a championship. so texas techs integrity has always been questionable. anyway, the university president put oit a statement that he doesnt care that sorseby violated regulation and that texas tech will sue any school that refuses to play them because it jeopardizes their championship prospects if they're umable to play any games.
this is all just startomg but its so juicy and delicious. the NCAA is going to crumble to dust if they cannot get this injunction overturned. schools like georgia and nebraska have plenty of money so a suit isnt necessarily a concern, but this will absolutely change college football forever. i cant stop reading about it.
update on this: texas tech is claiming that every school who has/is considering cancelling all contests is "afraid" that texas tech is better than them. what's funny about this is that sorsby's stats are average. he is not good enough for this kind of protection. many schools who have already cancelled or are considering it have much better quarterbacks than sorsby. also, texas tech's head coach had said that it's actually ok that sorsby bet against his own team because it "its not murder or assault."
the claim is now that texas texh university just cares so much about brendan sorsbys mental health that they have to sue everyone who calls this an integrity violation. any other school who wouldnt defend an athlete that committed this violation "doesnt care about mental health"
turnnoffyourmind
romaincrisis
andulkaphoto
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