Welcome back to another completely unnecessary update from yours truly. Nobody asked for this blog. I made it anyway. Statistically speaking, you’re one of maybe twelve people who will read this, and honestly? That’s a better completion rate than the USMNT had on defense this week. We’ll get there.
Let’s start light, because things are about to get heavy.
The Soundtrack: Mr. Electric Blue
I’ve had Benson Boone’s “Mr. Electric Blue” stuck in my head for a week straight, so you’re getting it too. It’s a glammy, ELO-inspired tribute to Boone’s dad, and it’s the kind of shiny, theatrical rock song that makes you want to buy a sequined jumpsuit you’ll never wear in public.
Also — and I will die on this hill — Benson Boone looks exactly like my friend John Gershow. Exactly. If John ever backflips in a baby blue jumpsuit at a music award show, I will not be surprised in the slightest.
Cubs Take Game 2, Because Of Course They Do
The Cubs beat the Orioles 9-7 behind a five-homer outburst, and Pete Crow-Armstrong once again did Pete Crow-Armstrong things — two home runs, one off a pitch that had limited hitters to a 2-for-27 clip all season. That gave him 21 homers and 23 steals, making him the first Cub ever to post back-to-back 20-20 seasons before the All-Star break, joining Sammy Sosa and Ryne Sandberg as the only Cubs to do it even once. He’s also the first big leaguer to pull off 20-20 in consecutive pre-All-Star-break seasons since Alfonso Soriano did it in 2002-03. The guy is a stat-sheet stuffing machine and he’s 24.
Naturally, this means it’s Trade Deadline Silly Season, and the rumor mill has landed on the same name it always lands on: Aroldis Chapman. Yes, that Aroldis Chapman, ten years removed from the 2016 World Series run, now 38, sitting on a sub-2.20 ERA for a fading Red Sox team. I love the nostalgia. I do. But “reunite with a 38-year-old closer for one more magic run” is the baseball equivalent of texting your college ex at 1am. Give me a break, front office.
And in a nice bonus, the Padres also picked up a win, beating Arizona 4-1 behind a Jake Cronenworth three-run homer and Mason Miller nailing down save number 23 — tops in the NL. Two wins, one night, zero complaints from me.
We’re Back at It With Iran
Quick reality check on where things stand, because it’s moved fast. Back in mid-June, the U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum that ended the earlier round of fighting — the Strait of Hormuz reopened to normal traffic, and the oil sanctions on Iran were temporarily lifted as part of the deal. For a few weeks, tankers were moving through freely, no extra war-risk premiums, no reimposed duties on Iranian oil.
That didn’t last. On July 7, two tankers — a Qatari-flagged LNG carrier and a Saudi-flagged supertanker — were struck by projectiles in the Strait. A third vessel was hit within 24 hours. The U.S. responded by revoking the oil sanctions waiver and launching retaliatory strikes, first hitting more than 80 Iranian military targets (air defenses, radar sites, small boats used by the Revolutionary Guard), then escalating again overnight into today, hitting roughly 90 targets along Iran’s coastline near the Strait. Iran has responded with strikes of its own on U.S.-linked facilities in Bahrain and Kuwait. President Trump has said things will “get much worse” if Iran keeps targeting ships in the strait, and has floated striking Iranian civilian infrastructure like power and desalination plants if it continues.
Here’s video CENTCOM released showing some of the strike footage from this latest round:
My two cents: this is exactly the leverage problem people warned about. The Strait of Hormuz carries something like 20% of the world’s seaborne oil. When it’s fully open, nobody thinks about it. The second Iran fires on a tanker, war-risk insurance premiums spike, oil markets get jumpy, and suddenly everyone remembers that a 21-mile-wide waterway can rattle the global economy. Iran doesn’t need to “win” a war to apply pressure — it just needs to remind everyone, periodically, that it can close the tap. That’s not a one-time cost. That’s a standing risk the U.S. and world markets now have to price in indefinitely, ceasefire or not.
Quick Global Roundup, Because Not Everything Is on Fire
Over at Wimbledon, Novak Djokovic just outlasted Felix Auger-Aliassime in a five-hour marathon to set up a semifinal with Jannik Sinner, because apparently Djokovic has decided age is a suggestion, not a rule. Meanwhile, a British wild card named Arthur Fery — who reportedly got into the tournament by emailing the All England Club directly, which is either the most British underdog story ever or a genius LinkedIn cold-outreach strategy — has crashed all the way to the semis. On the women’s side, Coco Gauff and Karolina Muchova are playing for a spot in Saturday’s final. Somewhere, a guy who’s ranked 400 spots below Fery is refreshing his email inbox right now hoping this works twice.
And over in France, the Tour de France is grinding through the Pyrenees, with Norway’s Torstein Traeen somehow holding the yellow jersey over actual cycling royalty like Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard, who are both sitting almost eight minutes back. Nothing quite like watching two of the best cyclists on the planet get shown up by a guy most casual fans had never heard of three weeks ago. The Tour runs through July 26, so there’s plenty of time for the favorites to remember they’re supposed to be good at this.
The USMNT Just Had One of the Most Embarrassing Nights in Program History
Okay. Deep breath. This is the section that’s going to take up most of the page, because it deserves it.
The USMNT was eliminated from its own home-soil World Cup in the Round of 16, losing 4-1 to Belgium in Seattle. Not a nail-biter. Not a “so close.” A 4-1 stomping, capped off by Belgium breaking out a celebration dance after their fourth goal — in our building, in front of our fans. There is no dressing that up.
The stats back up exactly how flat this team looked. In the second half against Belgium, Christian Pulisic lost the ball 16 times in 59 minutes and didn’t record a single shot or create a single chance — only the sixth time that’s happened to him in 76 career USMNT starts. He finished the entire tournament without a goal and with just one assist across four games, after also missing time with a calf injury. And on the goalkeeping side, Matt Freese — the first MLS-based goalkeeper to start a World Cup for the U.S. — had a costly turnover that opened the door for Belgium’s third goal. We used to roll out Premier League-caliber keepers like Tim Howard. This tournament, we didn’t have that same level between the posts, and it showed.
Pulisic was subbed off in the 58th-59th minute with what was reported as an ankle/knee injury. He said afterward he was frustrated about how it ended. But here’s the part that’s been eating the internet alive: multiple outlets reported — unconfirmed, but persistent — that Pulisic himself asked to come off. Landon Donovan addressed it directly, saying he couldn’t confirm it, but adding that he personally would have had to be dragged off that field in a World Cup knockout game with his leg still attached. Whether that specific report is true or not, the optics were brutal, and it fed directly into a growing chorus questioning whether the “Captain America” label even fits anymore — especially given how rarely he faces the media and how little accountability he’s taken publicly for a tournament-long no-show.
And this wasn’t some one-off bad night — it’s been a rough year, full stop. Pulisic just went through a 16-game scoreless drought for AC Milan, tying the longest goalless run of his entire club career, and he hasn’t scored for the USMNT since December 2024. Across 18 games for club and country since the start of 2026, he has zero goals and a single assist. His market value dropped from roughly $69 million to $54 million during the drought, knocking him out of Serie A’s top five most expensive players. And this all comes on the heels of him skipping the 2025 Gold Cup entirely to rest up for the World Cup — a decision that drew public criticism from Landon Donovan, Clint Dempsey, and reportedly “the dismay of many current and former teammates,” per Nick Wright. So the read here isn’t “bad game.” It’s a guy who opted out of a tournament to be fresh for this one, then delivered a scoreless, assist-less, chance-less World Cup on home soil anyway. That’s the part that stings.
If there’s any truth to it, I’ve got a modest proposal: bench him and start literally any hungry, fearless 13-year-old from a Jr. High travel team who understands what it means to wear that badge. Kids who’d crawl through broken glass for a chance to play in a World Cup on home soil. That’s the intensity this team was missing.
Nick Wright said it about as well as anyone. Watch this — he’s not wrong.
Real Talk: Why Aren’t More People Going to the Movies?
Genuine gripe, not a joke: I love the actual experience of going to the movies, and it bums me out that fewer people seem to feel the same way. Domestic box office is still running roughly 20-25% below 2019 levels even in a stacked 2026 release year, ticket sales have fallen to around 780 million annually — down nearly 37% from the 1.2 billion sold in 2019 — and a recent survey found the share of Americans who frequently see movies in theaters dropped from 39% in 2019 to just 17% last year. Theater chains are feeling it too: AMC’s attendance was down almost 10% in its most recent quarter. Streaming, rising ticket prices, and worse theater etiquette all get blamed, but a lot of it also comes down to this: give people a great, original movie and they’ll still show up. Give them a mediocre one, and they’ll wait for it to hit their couch.
Exhibit A: Supergirl. This thing cost $170 million to make and another $100-120 million to market, and it opened to just $38 million domestically — below Morbius, which is a sentence I never thought I’d type in a serious context. A 56% Rotten Tomatoes score, a B-minus Cinemascore (the worst for any DC movie besides Joker: Folie à Deux), and a second weekend that cratered to under $10 million. Critics weren’t shy about why: Variety called it “a comic-book movie with the worst script I can remember,” and reviews piled on the murky, gray visuals on top of that. In my opinion, the script is genuinely the root problem, but there’s a second issue underneath it: the studio played it way too safe with the character. Kara Zor-El spends most of the runtime as a mopey, drunk sad-sack before finally suiting up near the very end. Compare that to the first modern Wonder Woman movie — sexy, fun, confident from scene one, packed with nostalgia beats that actually landed. That’s the difference between a character who feels like an event and one who feels like homework.
That’s what nostalgia moments are supposed to do, and one of the best ones ever put on film is the alley scene from the original 1978 Superman, where Christopher Reeve — playing it completely straight, no CGI, just a guy in a suit and a well-placed slug of metal — casually deflects a bullet meant for Lois Lane. It’s a tiny, understated beat, and it’s more iconic than half the CGI battles in modern superhero movies combined:
Palate Cleanser: I’ve Been Rewatching Obsession
After all that, I needed something to take my mind off it, so I went back and rewatched Obsession — the horror movie that was made for something like $750,000 and has since made over $400 million worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing film ever produced on a budget under $1 million, blowing past even Sinners. No CGI. All practical effects, all performance. A guy named Bear makes an offhand wish on a cheap novelty toy for his crush Nikki to fall in love with him — and then discovers, in increasingly horrifying fashion, that he should have been way more specific about what he wished for.
For me, the moral is dead simple: be careful what you wish for. Sometimes the thing sitting right in front of you the whole time is better than whatever you think you want instead — and by the time you realize it, it might already be too late to walk it back.
That’s All, Folks
And that’s a wrap on today’s dispatch from the couch. If you made it all the way down here, congratulations — you have officially spent more time on this blog than the USMNT spent looking dangerous in the final third. Thanks for reading, thanks for putting up with my opinions on 38-year-old relief pitchers and mopey superhero reboots, and thanks for not asking why a guy who covers the Cubs, Iran, and Supergirl in the same post still doesn’t have a real editor. Go outside and enjoy some sun, hydrate, and I’ll see you next time — same nonsense, different day.
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