Do you have World Cup fever? You don't? Oh dear. Well, you might want to skip the first item in this week's newsletter.

Picking a side in an international sporting event should be easy enough. Glance at your birth certificate, find the listing for what country you were born in, and root like hell for that particular nation. Failing that, you pull for the place where you've put down roots or where your relatives come from or whatever country you've developed an affinity for. This shouldn't be that complicated.

And yet, in 2026, things have a way of complicating themselves rather quickly.

The U.S. is co-hosting the World Cup in the year of our country's sesquicentennial, and you'll forgive me for saying so, but it's hard to find much to celebrate about either event. The World Cup's troubles have already been noted in this space, i.e. the high ticket prices, high-handed visa requirements and general ickiness surrounding anything FIFA sinks its claws into. 

The malaise gripping the U.S. at the moment is something I assume you're familiar with, but just to recap: since the current president returned to office, we've been treated to people getting whisked off the street by masked, unaccountable agents of the state; those same agents killing bystanders without consequence; government agencies stripped for parts by an unelected trillionaire who also dabbles in white supremacy and causing hundreds of thousands of deaths; and a general "why shouldn't I wet my beak?" ethos emanating from the Oval Office and beyond. 

Urging on the U.S. men's team with chants of "USA" feel very ill-timed.

It shouldn't be that way, certainly not for a soccer fan (which I am) or for someone who's cheered on the U.S. men's team in the past (which I've done). I attended a pre-2006 World Cup friendly between the U.S. and Japan at the San Francisco Giants' baseball stadium — not a place configured to host a soccer match of any kind, really — and rooted for what was clearly a team fated for a group stage exit. I used to own a men's team t-shirt that was a clever play off the Gadsden flag — a snake curled around a soccer ball with the words "Don't tread on me" — that I had to stop wearing when the Gadsden flag got co-opted by... well, let's just say a political movement I share very little in common with. And even then, it was certainly easier to root for U.S. soccer than it was at the start of this World Cup.

Yet, soccer observers like to point out that before the sturm und drang that seems to precede every World Cup, once the matches begin, the soccer itself retakes the spotlight. That's certainly been the case for the U.S. team, which, two matches in, has played the best soccer of any male American team in my lifetime.

The U.S. pressed Paraguay off the pitch in a 4-1 drubbing in its opening match, and then followed up with a tidy 2-0 dismissal of Australia. The upcoming match against Turkiye is the deadest of dead rubbers — the U.S. will advance to the knockout stage as the group winners no matter what happens, and Turkiye is already eliminated from the tournament – and the luck of the draw makes the first quarterfinal appearance for the U.S. since 2002 a very real possibility. 

It's been fun to watch, and it helps that players like Florian Balogun, Alex Freeman and Tyler Adams are even great stories. Even the inevitable attempts by the worst people in the world to appropriate the U.S. team's success for their own ends have landed with a splat.

It puts me in mind of my next-door neighbors when I was living in a Los Angeles apartment back in 1998. The family next door hailed from Iran, and while I never discussed politics with them, I got the impression that they weren't big fans of the ruling regime back home. Certainly, the swimsuit the mom wore at the apartment complex's pool suggested she and the Ayatollah didn't see eye to eye on dress codes.

And yet, when Iran took on the U.S. in the group stage at the 1998 World Cup, my neighbors cheered wildly for Iran over their adopted home. It didn't matter that they had moved halfway around the world — they were just happy to see people who shared their heritage thriving on the world stage.

"A lot of bullshit happens in our country," Kevin Durant said when he was playing as a member of the U.S. basketball team at the 2024 Olympics. "But a lot of great things happen, too." I think my former neighbors would have agreed with the sentiment — and I hope they've enjoyed Iran's matches this time out, too.

If you blew past the preceding World Cup item, I regret to inform you that you've stumbled into another section you'll need to hustle through. I wrote about the World Cup for Awful Announcing — specifically, how you can address any complaints with Fox's broadcast simply by watching Telemundo, even if you don't know a pelota from a disparo.

By the time you read this, my daughter will be on her way to China. But before she left, I made sure to equip her phone with the settings she'll need to have a wonderful trip. And then I sat down and wrote about all the things you can do for your phone pre-international trip for Wirecutter.

Also by the time you read this, Amazon Prime Day will be underway. I am marking my ongoing unemployment by celebrating the fact I no longer have to cover Prime Day for work. You'll find my sage Prime Day advice — just ignore it and it will go away — over at SixColors.com

Hey — you can do something about my continued unemployment by hiring me on a full-time, part-time or freelance basis. If you ask nicely, I'll even cover Prime Day for you, since I'm the most loyal employee that money can buy. See my LinkedIn profile for my bona fides.

Speaking of my time in Los Angeles, my apartment complex was in the shadow of one of the runways at Los Angeles International Airport — so close that the windows would rattle on takeoffs. That also meant my apartment complex was just a short walk away from an actual ghost town.

Surfridge was a neighborhood that sprang up on the California coast in the 1920s as part of the Palisades Del Rey development. With only a street called Vista Del Mar standing between the houses and the Pacific Ocean, you can imagine that Surfridge was intended to be a place where well-to-do Angelenos could put up stakes. And for a time, that's exactly what happened, as folks like the director Cecil B. DeMille called Surfridge home.

Just one problem — an airfield named Mines Field opened up with some dirt landing strips in 1928. 

Within a decade, the place was renamed Los Angeles Municipal Airport, and as the number of commercial flights began to expand, so did the airport itself, with planes taking off right over the Surfridge houses.

Things came to a head with the arrival of jet engines, as those proved to be a bit too loud to ignore. Faced with a need to expand the airport further and subject Surfridge residents to even greater noise pollution, the city of Los Angeles used eminent domain to take over the neighborhood, forcing everyone out — one of the few instances where wealthier folks wound up on the wrong side of city planning decisions. Surfridge was emptied of its residents, the houses came down, and the runway expanded, with jets now soaring over empty streets.

Surfridge is fenced off now and the only time you get to see what's left of the place is when a camera crew finagles their way in. That's what happened with a recent episode of Lost LA where host Nathan Masters and historian Meredith Drake Reitan stroll through Surfridge. (You'll have to jump ahead to the 18-minute mark to get to the Surfridge bit, though honestly, the other segments on the Tehachapi Loop and the Thomas Bros. Guides are also worthwhile.)

Surfridge has been empty for 50 to 60 years now, and it's striking to see how much of that area has been reclaimed by nature. Housing lots are overgrown, and sea grasses are bursting through the asphalt. It's a rare glimpse of what happens to a place when everyone moves out and their remnants of their time there begin to crumble. One moment, the director of The Ten Commandments is grilling some steaks for his Hollywood pals in his backyard, the next minute, the tumbleweeds are blowing through.

Open up wide for some links to other things of interest out there on the internet. Yum, yum, yum!

As someone whose teen years landed squarely in the 1980s, I possess a reptilian part of my psyche that appreciates the brainless teen sex comedies of that era. And so when there's an attempt to reboot that genre without the retrograde attitudes that guided the movie-making of that era, I'm going to pay attention.

This is how I found myself watching the unfortunately titled Summer of 69, which has nothing to do with the year or the Bryan Adams song. In fact, despite copious needle drops throughout the picture, that particular cut off of Adams' Reckless album never makes an appearance. This feels like malpractice.

The plot of Summer of 69 will be familiar to anyone who had an HBO subscription between 1981 and 1990: an awkward high school senior learns her long-time crush has just broken up with his girlfriend and decides to make her move, only to hear a rumor that his favorite after-dark assignation involves... well, it's there in the movie's title, isn't it? 

Being a naif with little to no sexual experience, our heroine employs the services of a stripper to teach her to be more of a seductress. Do complications ensue? Friends, do they ever.

Again, this is largely indistinguishable from what I was watching in the late '80s when I thought my parents weren't around.

And good lord, does Summer of 69 trumpet its '80s sex comedy roots. There's a subplot where the strip club needs to be saved from the clutches of an evil businessman straight out of The Great Bikini Carwash Company. There's a sequence at the end of the movie that's such a straight homage to Sixteen Candles, the estate of John Hughes better ask for a cut of the gross. If you could toss a tape of Summer of 69 into a time machine headed back to 1990, there's a very good chance that Gilbert Gottfried would be introducing the movie for a late-night airing on the USA Network. The only thing he might boggle at is how the female characters are far more fully realized than what you get from your various Porkys-es or assorted Meatballses. (Porki? Meatsball?) That's a positive step. Comedy's a lot more fun when it's more inclusive

Do not mistake any part of the preceding paragraph as a pan, by the way.

I gave Summer of 69 a watch largely because it casts Chloe Fineman in the part of the sex worker-with-a-heart-of-gold, and I enjoy her mimic work on Saturday Night Live. (Also, she went to high school in Piedmont, a short drive away from Get Your Phil World Headquarters. She appeared on the Letterman show back in high school! That's kind of interesting!) Sadly, she's one of the weaker parts of the movie, trumped only by Charlie Day's ill-judged performance as the aforementioned evil businessman. Fineman's part requires a greater warmth, so that the audience buys into the contrivance of her and the mousy high school girl becoming fast friends. But that just didn't come across to me, so the denouement fell flat.

You know who is good in the movie, though? Sam Morelos, who plays our lovelorn teen. She's amiable company throughout the picture, plays a great scene partner with the other actors, and delivers some really believable (and funny) reactions to what's happening around her. Throw in a supporting turn from Paula Pell — really, a gift from the comedy gods — and you've got an enjoyable little picture if you don't mind an occasional turn to the vulgar. As we've established here, I do not.

And that's the Phil for this week — thanks for reading. We'll be back next week, but only after I finish my spec script for a 1980s teen sex comedy set at the World Cup.