Hello and welcome to Saturday, June 13, 2026. Today is World Gin Day, National Cupcake Lovers Day, National Chenin Blanc Wine Day, and my personal favorite, National Kitchen Klutzes Day.
Before we begin here, I note that UP's 4014 is going through Cleveland again today, on its way back west. I'm putting together something about the journey west. As you can imagine, there's a small mountain of stuff to sift through.
1777: The Marquis de Lafayette lands in the U.S.
1789: Mrs. Alexander Hamilton serves ice cream for dessert to George Washington.
1866: The U.S. House of Representatives passes the 14th Amendment (civil rights).
1907: The lowest temperature ever in the lower 48 U.S. states for June, 2°F in Tamarack, California.
1920: The U.S. Post Office states that children cannot be sent by parcel post, after various instances. Gives "delivering babies" a whole new meaning.
1922: Longest recorded attack of hiccups begins when Charles Osborne gets the hiccups and continues for 68 years; he dies eleven months after they stop. He must have been lots of fun at parties.
1927: A ticker-tape parade welcomes aviator Charles Lindbergh to New York City.
1942: The United States opens its Office of War Information, with Elmer Davis as its head.
1948: Babe Ruth's final farewell at Yankee Stadium; he dies Aug. 16.
1966: The U.S. Supreme Court's Miranda decision; suspects must be informed of their rights.
1971: The New York Times begins publishing excerpts from the Pentagon Papers, classified documents on the long history of the U.S. in Vietnam.
Birthdays Today Include: James Clerk Maxwell, Scottish physicist (electromagnetic theory, speed of light); W. B. Yeats, Irish poet; Wallace Sabine, physicist (father of architectural acoustics); Basil Rathbone, South African-born British actor (Sherlock Holmes films, and the sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood); Red Grange, the "Galloping Ghost" of football (University of Illinois, Chicago Bears); Paul Lynde, comedian and actor (The Hollywood Squares, Uncle Arthur in Bewitched); Uriel Jones, session drummer (Motown's Funk Brothers); Bobby Freeman, singer ("Do You Want to Dance?"); Malcolm McDowell, actor, (Clockwork Orange, Caligula, StarTrek: Generations); Jerrold Nadler (House of Representatives from New York); Richard Thomas, actor (John Boy — The Waltons); Tim Allen, actor and comedian (Home Improvement, The Santa Clause, Toy Story); and Ally Sheedy, actress (Wargames, Breakfast Club).
If today's your day as well, you have some seriously famous company. Happy day to you.
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Let me be up front. (OK, when am I not annoyingly up front seems a valid question, but let's ignore that for now).
Soccer bores me to tears. You won't catch me sprawled in my recliner, wine in hand, cheese and crackers on the coffee table, hemorrhaging money on streaming packages to watch people kick a ball around cities I'll never visit. That's not entertainment — that's a cry for help. Sorry, not sorry. Sure, I played the game, and I even did some impressive stuff (and some less so) on the field back in the day 50 years ago. But caring about it? No, not even back then. Now? Hard pass.
Apparently, enough of my countrymen share my indifference on those matters, because soccer has never managed to crack the American wallet in any meaningful way. This bothers me exactly as much as you'd expect: not at all.
Now, before you slap a "sports curmudgeon" label on me, let me clarify: I do throw money at a streaming subscription following a sport — but for my Buffalo Bills, thank you very much.
Here's the problem: I live just far enough outside the Buffalo and Rochester markets and in a deep enough valley alongside the Genesee River, that the over-the-air signal has personally decided I don't exist. I suppose that if I erected a tower of around 60 feet and plopped an antenna on it, I could get the over-the-air signal, but I can't imagine that would be overly popular with the neighbors, even aside from the expense. So I pay to stream my own team like some kind of peasant. The universe taxes me for living where I live, and I pay it anyway. I have my priorities, ya know.
Meanwhile, Europe has apparently looked at American football and lost its collective mind — in the best possible way. Every NFL game London has hosted since 2007 sold out. Every single one. In 2025, ticket sales had to screech to a halt with 250,000 people queued in the system. A quarter million people, sitting in a digital waiting room, hoping to watch a sport their continent didn't invent.
Germany took it even further. When Tampa Bay faced Seattle in Munich in 2022, 800,000 people stampeded the ticketing system simultaneously. The stadium holds 67,000 at maximum capacity. Organizers could have sold three million tickets to that game and still turned people away. Three million. For a sport that European soccer fans supposedly ignore. Scalpers, naturally, spotted the opportunity and helped themselves — because scalpers are the cockroaches of the live event world, and they thrive everywhere.
So let me get this straight: Europeans mock America for not embracing soccer, while simultaneously losing their minds trying to score seats to watch men in helmets and pads crash into each other at full speed. I'm not saying anything. I'm just saying. There does seem something of a disconnect there.
I suppose we might take that data in two ways. We might assume they're curious, or perhaps more open-minded on their entertainment choices, or as seems more likely to me, we might aver that they're bored with soccer, too. I'll leave that one to you.
Enter Newsbusters to the conversation:
Over the past couple of days, social media has been filled with foreign tourists marveling over aspects of American culture and hospitality ahead of the World Cup. For CNN sports analyst Christine Brennan, this was a surprising development, especially for tourists visiting the South. On Friday’s edition of The Situation Room, Brennan told hosts Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown that “we would never have anticipated” such hospitality given the country’s reputation as being “inhospitable.” Brennan never clarified who she meant by “we.”
Alex Christy over on X:
CNN did a segment on Freddy, the German soccer tourist, and sports analyst Christine Brennan claimed "I saw some conversation, Wolf and Pamela, about how the rest of the world is looking at the United States and feeling that we are—it's a foreboding image and that we are… pic.twitter.com/Eh2zQ8x5Pr
— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) June 12, 2026
Honestly, who's more clueless here — the soccer tourists fresh off the plane from around the world, or CNN? Hard to call. Though I'll admit my irritation zeroes in specifically on Christine Brennan's sad excuse for "reporting." It is (alas!) exemplary of what our press has been dishing out for decades. So let's ask the real question: whose prejudices are we actually dissecting — the tourists', or those of our press?
Let's consider that we're talking about people who have the income to cover the kind of expense that traveling inflicts these days. Rich by the very definition of the thing. You might think the anti-rich left- leaners in our press corps would be instinctively hostile. But no. Let's also consider that, if we take our own press' word for it, many denizens of the EU consider coming here a dangerous sojourn.
We all know the American press has spent decades gleefully wallowing in a bubble of self-loathing about this country and its culture. Southerners, meanwhile, keep doing what they've always done — welcoming strangers who haven't already bought into the media's favorite narrative that most Americans are knuckle draggers who are barely civilized. Funny how that works.
So here's the thing worth examining: where exactly are EU visitors picking up these charming impressions of America? From living here? From talking to Americans? No — they've been getting it nonstop for many years from outlets such as CNN, who hand them the script before they even board the flight. So they're shocked and pleasantly amazed once they actually get here and see things without the leftist filter.
So which enemy are we actually fighting — the misconceptions of foreign visitors to our country, or the American media's compulsive need to manufacture those misconceptions?
Thought of the day: Notice, please, that the same people who are now screaming about how Karmelo Anthony acted in self-defense are the same ones who not so long ago were calling Kyle Rittenhouse a murderer for defending himself against three white guys who were pounding the snot out of him.
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Enjoy your Saturday, my friends. You only get so many of them. Come back tomorrow, and bring a friend. I'll see you then.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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