Buckle up, this one’s a grab bag. New site, a baseball game I barely watched from an actual seat, a World Cup double-header that turned me into a temporary England fan, a golf update, a political obituary, and a couple of interviews worth your time. Let’s go. As, always, it’s time for some music to start the blog off properly. Go Goo Goo Dolls.
The Blog Got a Glow-Up
If you’re reading this on a phone or an iPad and things look different, you’re not losing it. Big Waste of Time got a full redesign this week — new layout, faster image loading, an actual search bar (revolutionary, I know), and a homepage that finally does more than just sit there looking pretty. The biggest difference shows up on desktop and iPad, where the whole thing breathes a lot better than the old cramped version. Mobile got some love too, but the desktop/iPad glow-up is the one you’ll really notice. Poke around, break something, let me know.
A Padres Game We Never Actually Watched From Our Seats
Had one of the best nights out with my wife last night, and the funniest part is we technically didn’t need the tickets. We had Premier Club seats for Padres-Blue Jays — the Padres won 8-7, Ty France came up big — and we never sat in them. Not once. That Premier Club ticket comes with access to the Lexus Club, one of those exclusive, you-need-the-right-ticket-value-to-get-in kind of spots, and once we walked in there, that was it, we were done. We met some genuinely fun people and, okay fine, it also might have had something to do with the Lexus Club having a wall of giant screens showing both the Padres game and the World Cup quarterfinals. England-Norway first, then Argentina-Switzerland. So we bounced between three different sporting events without ever leaving one room, like some kind of degenerate sports buffet, and never once made it out to our actual seats.
England beat Norway 2-1 in extra time off a Jude Bellingham special, and then Argentina outlasted Switzerland 3-1 in extra time of their own, setting up an Argentina-England semifinal. I found myself cheering for England, which meant wearing Padres yellow for a night — deeply uncomfortable for a Cubs blue guy, but the heart wants what it wants when Jude Bellingham is bearing down on goal.
But really, the whole night just reminded me how lucky I am. Not every marriage can survive “let’s ignore the seats we paid for and just talk to strangers for four hours,” but mine can, and that’s kind of the whole point.
Lindsey Graham
Senator Lindsey Graham died this weekend at 71, after what his office called a “brief and sudden illness” — reports point to cardiac arrest at his home on Capitol Hill. 23 years in the Senate is a real career, and that’s worth acknowledging regardless of where you stood on him politically.
And where I stood on him politically was: exhausted. The man’s relationship with Trump had more plot twists than a bad Netflix drama — couldn’t stand him, then loved him, then who knows what he’d have said next week. Pick a lane, senator. We’ll never get the finale now.
Golf’s Big Fortnight: Scotland, Then England
The Scottish Open wrapped up with a storybook ending: Scotland’s own Robert MacIntyre won on home turf at 18-under, holding off a stacked leaderboard that included Rory McIlroy and Chris Gotterup tied for second. Nothing hits quite like a hometown kid lifting a trophy in front of his own crowd.
Now everyone packs up for Royal Birkdale, where The Open — sorry, THE Open, all caps, don’t call it the British Open in front of the R&A — tees off July 16-19. Scottie Scheffler is defending after his win at Portrush last year and chasing back-to-back Claret Jugs, something nobody’s pulled off since Padraig Harrington in 2007-08 — fittingly, at this same course. Rory’s out to make it two majors in one year after his Masters win. Should be a good one.
Mick Jagger Sits Down With The New York Times
82-year-old Mick Jagger joined David Marchese for the New York Times’ “The Interview” podcast this week, and it’s a genuinely great watch, not just a promo lap. Ostensibly it’s about the Stones’ new album, Foreign Tongues, but it wanders into much better territory: whether he’s played his last Rolling Stones show, what fame and touring have done to him over sixty-plus years, and how he actually feels about getting older. On that last one, Jagger doesn’t sugarcoat it at all — “There’s nothing good about it,” he says, joking that whatever wisdom aging was supposed to hand him, he’s already forgotten it.
The best stretch, though, is when Marchese gets him talking about his relationship with the crowd — contrasting Bob Dylan, who treats the audience almost like it’s incidental to the show, against someone like Bruce Springsteen, who’s turned recent concerts into a running political statement. Jagger’s not interested in following that path. His view: nobody’s paying for a ticket to be lectured. Sixty years in and he still seems to understand, better than almost anyone, what the room actually wants from him.
Matt Damon Walks With Christopher Nolan for Odyssey
The Odyssey hits theaters July 17, and this is Damon’s third rodeo with Nolan after Interstellar and Oppenheimer — so by now he knows exactly what he’s signing up for. Damon plays Odysseus, and by his own account he opened the script and immediately thought, essentially, I don’t know how the hell we’re going to do this. His solution was refreshingly simple: stop worrying about the parts of the movie that aren’t his job. As he put it, he decided he’d just “show up, and I’ll be ready,” treating himself as one piece of a massive production rather than trying to carry the whole thing on his shoulders.
Watching Damon and Nolan talk through it together is a nice reminder of why their collaborations keep working — there’s a real trust there after three films, and it shows. I’m fully in for this one. A Nolan-scale Homer epic with Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, and Tom Holland as Telemachus sounds like exactly the kind of big, ambitious swing that gets me back in a theater seat.
That’s All, Folks
That’s the rundown — new site, a night I mostly spent standing in a club instead of sitting in my seat, a dead senator I couldn’t figure out, some golf, Mick Jagger being unreasonably wise about aging, and Matt Damon getting ready to make me cry over a 3,000-year-old poem. I’m off to the gym to get the pump on, because apparently talking about Lindsey Graham’s political flip-flopping burns zero calories. Go outside, hydrate, and I’ll see you next time — same nonsense, different day.
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