Welcome to Monday, July 20, 2026. Glad you made it.
The calendar says today is Moon Landing Day, Lollipop Day, Ice Cream Day, Ice Cream Soda Day, Fortune Cookie Day, Chess Day, Get Out of the Dog House Day, Space Exploration Day, World Jump Day, and Ugly Truck Contest Day.
Today In History:
1810: Colombia declared independence from Spain.
1861: The Congress of the Confederate States began holding sessions in Richmond, Virginia.
1871: British Columbia entered Confederation as a Canadian province.
1881: Sitting Bull surrendered to federal troops five years after the Battle of Little Bighorn.
1917: The World War I draft lottery began, with Secretary of War Newton D. Baker drawing the first capsule blindfolded.
1923: Revolutionary Pancho Villa was assassinated in a hail of bullets in Parral, Mexico.
1942: The first detachment of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps began basic training at Fort Des Moines, Iowa.
1944: A bomb plot against Hitler failed, leaving him only slightly wounded.
1944: Franklin Roosevelt was nominated for an unprecedented fourth term at the Democratic convention in Chicago.
1969: Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to walk on the Moon, fitting neatly alongside today’s Moon Landing Day.
1976: The Viking 1 spacecraft made the first successful landing on Mars, tying nicely to Space Exploration Day.
1977: A flash flood killed more than 80 people in Johnstown, Penn.
1982: IRA bombs killed eight soldiers and seven horses belonging to the Queen’s Household Cavalry in two London parks.
2012: A gunman opened fire during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado.
Birthdays Today Include: Gregor Mendel, scientist whose pea plant experiments founded modern genetics; Natalie Wood, actor (West Side Story, Rebel Without a Cause); Diana Rigg, actor (The Avengers, Game of Thrones); Carlos Santana, guitarist (Abraxas, “Smooth”); Sandra Oh, actor (Grey’s Anatomy, Killing Eve); Josh Holloway, actor (Lost); Judy Greer, actor (13 Going on 30, Arrested Development); Gisele Bündchen, model; John Francis Daley, actor and director (Bones, Game Night); Omar Epps, actor (House); Julianne Hough, dancer and actor (Dancing with the Stars); Ray Allen, basketball player, NBA champion, and three-point record holder; Chris Cornell, musician, Soundgarden and Audioslave frontman (“Black Hole Sun”); Tim Ferriss, author (The 4-Hour Workweek).
Happy Birthday!
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I’ve said it before: soccer bores me senseless, the sporting equivalent of watching paint dry. Yet I tuned in anyway, because apparently I enjoy the most painful of punishments. So there I sat, morbidly curious, watching the BBC cover the World Cup Final’s dying seconds—and then the circus that erupted the second the clock hit zero. Well, as a reward for my self-sacrifice, I now have a subject for today’s column, and that’s nice.
Spoiler alert: If you pictured the World Cup as some grand global campfire, humanity linking arms and singing “Kumbaya” in a dozen languages while sport transcends our petty tribal nonsense—I’m sorry to inform you that reality took a tire iron to that fantasy. It didn’t waste a second reminding everyone what “the beautiful game” actually looks like once the final whistle blows.
This all went down at the Meadowlands, so maybe there really is something in the water over in Jersey. Yeah. That’s it. Must be.
There’s a lot of back-and-forth about the officiating being in Argentina’s pocket. That’s questionable on its face, given Spain’s victory. Still, this will be the subject of back-and-forth for years to come among soccer fans.
In any event, as to the exhibition following the final whistle, let’s be honest. A red card thrown after the tournament’s already in the ground isn’t discipline. It’s a eulogy with a whistle attached. Nothing that follows that red card even comes close to touching Argentina’s World Cup run, because that run is over—dead, buried, box checked. The nuclear option on the table is a one-match ban, and no match remains to ban anyone from. It’s a sentence with no prison to serve it in.
Whoever hands down that suspension will cash it in—literally years later—in some meaningless qualifier nobody outside the federation will bother remembering. That’s not punishment. That’s a rain check nobody asked for. So please, spare me the outrage that discipline evaporated the second the whistle blew. A lot of the tension we saw was apparently amped up by the officials. Discipline didn’t evaporate. It never showed up. The final whistle just stopped everyone pretending otherwise. The post-match exhibition happened because every one of the players knew all this. They knew the brakes were off and responded accordingly.
I should end this discussion with who really won the FIFA affair: The United States won bigly. Oh, I know the team lost on the field. But it cannot be denied that we raked in the bucks. Just the other day, Bank of America’s CEO Brian Moynihan put the total U.S. economic impact at roughly $20 billion, out of $40 billion generated globally, disclosed on the eve of Sunday’s final between Argentina and Spain. By the way, that’s about twice what Mexico pulled during the last World Cup cycle.
We won in another field as well: that of image. For so many years, Europeans have held a negative view of us. The gap between that perception and the reality opened a lot of eyes around the world. Coverage from AP (picked up widely by ABC News, NewsNation, and others) found that visitors’ views of the United States, in many cases shaped by the sometimes distorted establishing shots presented by the news media, TikTok, and word of mouth, are now informed by what they’ve seen with their own eyes. Specifically, many tourists landed expecting the politically fractured country that global headlines often trumpet, and instead found Uber drivers full of recommendations and locals willing to open their homes to strangers.
I dunno. I suppose I could write an entire column about the gap between what the soccer fans had been told by their press… and alas, by ours, and what they saw, heard, and felt themselves once they got here. The image of Americans being unwelcoming, racist, hard-nosed, and fractured melted away once they saw things for themselves without the American press filtering out the positives. That’s a huge win.
It is worth noting that many Americans find themselves seeing their country with a fresh perspective, again, without the Lamestream media’s filters applied. We have far too many things in our country and in our culture that we have taken for granted for far too long. Seeing those things vicariously through the eyes of visitors ends up being a pleasant and revealing shock to the system. This, too, is a huge win.
I may still write an entire column on the matter. But I make extended note of it here because, with all the controversy going on over the final round, it seems appropriate to bring up the big bright spot for America in all of this.
Thought of the day: Reputation is what people hear about you. Character is what they find when they show up anyway.
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Take care, gang. I’ll see you tomorrow.
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