Welcome to the 10th issue of Get Your Phil, the best free newsletter I've ever written. Just 208 more of these, and we will have outlasted the Confederacy.

I will admit to being pretty excited when the U.S. successfully mounted a bid to co-host the 2026 World Cup with its North American running buddies, Canada and Mexico. I enjoy soccer quite a bit, and the chance to attend the sport's premier event without having to wander too far from home sounded like a great opportunity. It seemed likely when news of the hosting duties broke in 2018 that the Bay Area would be included in the list of venues, and lo, that came to pass. (Matches near me will be held in Santa Clara, but one must take the bitter with the sweet.)

I've been to a World Cup before — we timed a family trip to France to coincide with the 2019 women's tournament, and that allowed me to take in a match at the Parc de Princes that turned out to be a real 3-3 cracker.* Great atmosphere, fun crowd, would love to do it again — and this time without having to fly across an ocean and get soaked in a torrential downpour just before kickoff.

Sadly, my enthusiasm over this summer's World Cup has dimmed considerably since those heady days eight years ago. FIFA is charging extortionate prices to attend matches — a quick scan of StubHub found that the cheapest seat for the Switzerland-Qatar group stage match on June 13 would set me back $280. That's a far cry from the €50 or so I paid for the 2019 tournament, and a bit out of the price range for someone who finds himself between employers at the moment **. And believe me — a sub-$300 2026 World Cup ticket is a bargain based on the other prices I'm seeing.

The gouging doesn't stop once you have your match tickets in hand. If you're attending matches at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., an MBTA train from Boston to the venue will cost $75; up from the normal $20 round-trip fare. The MBTA option is the bargain, since a bus trip to the stadium will cost $95. Fans who opt to drive to Foxborough can forget about tailgating before a match — that's been banned by organizers.

A little bit further south, fans heading to MetLife Stadium from New York City will have to pay $150 for the round-trip train ride between Penn Station and East Rutherford, NJ. That's only a modest twelvefold increase over the regular $12.90 fare. Don't think there's a workaround either, as, famously, pedestrian access to MetLife is strictly forbidden.

The blame for these markups isn't entirely the fault of local transit authorities. Besides the over-reliance on automobiles for getting from one point to another in the U.S., you can point your finger strictly at FIFA for this wretched state of affairs. (Hit me up privately for suggestions on which finger to point at FIFA.)

As Kathryn Xu notes at Defector, FIFA places a lot of demands on whoever hosts the World Cup, including stringent safety and security requirements for transit. You would assume that FIFA might kick in some money to help with that, but that ignores the reality that FIFA officials didn't become obscenely wealthy by writing out a lot of checks. 

Instead, the burden falls on the host country and the local agencies tasked with bringing everything up to snuff. And with minimal federal funding, that puts those agencies in a bind — they can either blow a big hole in their own budget, impacting service long after the FIFA circus leaves town, or they can pass the costs on to people attending the event, even if that hits local fans in the pocketbook. Officials in New Jersey and Boston are opting for the latter.

It all adds to what's been a pretty miserable build-up for the World Cup, which has already featured the U.S. bombing one of the participating nations, while also using its unaccountable force of armed goons to terrorize citizens coast-to-coast. FIFA would like very much for ticket-holding attendees not to be subject to an ICE-sponsored kidnapping, so it's apparently going to ask the Trump administration to back off on the thuggery for a month or so this summer. The beatings will resume shortly after the winning team exits the country.

Rogue nations often engage in a practice called sportswashing when they use major sporting events to draw attention away from state-sanctioned human rights abuses and kleptocracy. (See Saudi Arabia and its investments in soccer, golf, and combat sports as a textbook example.) 

But what do you call it when hosting global events runs a highlighter pen over a country's excesses and abuses? Between the World Cup this year and the Olympics in 2028, it looks like the U.S. is about to find out.

* Fun fact from that World Cup match I went to: When Jen Beattie of Scotland scored just after halftime to put her team up 2-0, she recorded a goal in the same stadium where her father had scored a try for Scotland in a Five Nations rugby match 32 years previously. Impress your friends and family with that bit of trivia!

** Know anyone looking for a skilled reporter, writer, and editor? Have I got a guy for you! The fact that I even have former colleagues still willing to vouch for me also speaks to my managerial and project-heading skills, so you really get the whole package when you get me. That's your Phil! Recommend him to all friends hiring skilled communicators!

As a rule, I'm generally not a fan of reviving shows and movies that had their day in still-living memory. I'd rather hear new stories that introduce new characters rather than play it safe by revisiting well-trodden territory. But we live in an age where studios look to maintain steady revenue streams by wringing every last dollar out of existing IP., so at any given point, you're likely to log on to a streaming service only to see a promo for some narrative franchise you assumed was dead and buried.

Consequently, I was not looking forward to the rebooted Malcolm in the Middle, which arrived on Hulu/Disney Plus earlier this spring. 

I enjoyed the TV series in its original incarnation — at the time of its debut, it offered a pretty bold narrative structure with takes to the camera, quick cuts, and other tricks that have since become standard fare for single-camera comedies. Even more notably, Malcolm in the Middle showed family life in all its messiness, unlike the more polished, Pollyana-ish takes offered by more conventional sitcoms. The characters on Malcolm in the Middle fought each other tooth and nail, only to quickly unite against common enemies like school bullies and judgmental neighbors. Their jumbled, askew household felt more true-to-life than other TV shows at the time.

Over the course of Malcolm's original run, I stopped regularly watching the show — the kids aged and got less cute, the situations felt a bit more contrived. And I'd rather cut my losses and remember a program for how it started than brood over the state it finished in.

Surprisingly, Malcolm in the Middle: Life's Still Unfair doesn't fall into the trap of other reboots by picking up where the old show left off. Instead, the new version acknowledges that there's been a lot of life lived without wasting much time on how it was lived. We get the characters as they are now — not how we remember them, but with a little bit more familiarity than if we were starting cold.

Malcolm has always benefitted from the pairing of Jane Kaczmarek and Bryan Cranston as parents Lois and Hal. They're one of the few on-screen married couples that remain deeply in love after decades of marriage, in ways both admirable and hilarious. It also helps that Bryan Cranston is arguably one of our greatest living actors, and certainly a man who realizes that playing it cool is the enemy of laughter. When you see him naked and writing on the floor in an episode of the Malcolm reboot, you'll get what I mean.

It also speaks to the strength of Malcolm in the Middle: Life's Still Unfair that I also found myself impressed by the performance of Vaughan Murrae, who plays a character not even in much of the original series — Malcolm's youngest sibling Kelly, conceived immediately before the conclusion of the final season. Murrae's engaging, funny, and a natural fit with the already-established ensemble. 

If it turns out Life's Still Unfair is a backdoor pilot for a full-fledged revival, I could easily find myself tuning in for the ongoing adventures of Kelly and Leah (Malcolm's teenage daughter) and whoever else from the original series pops in from time to time. As it stands, at four episodes, the revived series doesn't outstay its welcome while reminding you why you enjoyed the company of these characters in the first place.

Last week was Jackie Robinson Day in baseball, the day Major League Baseball pats itself on the back for Jackie Robinson breaking the sport's color line in 1947. It's always an odd occasion in my mind — "Let's celebrate the time we stopped being awful!" — and made even more so by current MLB leadership bending over backwards to remove almost all mentions of race from any Jackie Robinson commemorations lest that upset the sensitive bigots currently running the country.

Consider the MLB-approved video broadcast in stadiums around the country to mark the occasion. 

"Courage, determination, excellence," it begins. "These were not just Jackie's values — they were part of America's promise. In every child who dares to dream and every worker who breaks new ground and every voice that lifts and inspires others, Jackie lives on." 

Left unspecified is just why Jackie Robinson needed to exhibit courage and determination, and what new ground needed to be broken in the first place. It's inspiration without examination, and it's really an insult to the struggle that far too many people still have to deal with.

But instead of dwelling on that, let's turn our attention to a more uplifting aspect of Jackie Robinson Day — the time the Secret Service threatened to shoot Mr. Met.

It was the very first Jackie Robinson celebration in 1997, attended by then-President Bill Clinton. As such, security at Shea Stadium was tight that evening, with the Secret Service detail giving very detailed instructions to AJ Mass, the fellow inside the costume of the New York Mets mascot.

As related by Mass in a book excerpt published by the Huffington Post:

Friends, I have to confess: I feel a little responsible for the way the Secret Service spoke to poor Mr. Met that night in 1997.

Flash back to 1994. I am freshly out of college, working a gig in Los Angeles, at the same time the University of California Board of Regents is holding an important meeting on the UCLA campus. That same day, President Clinton will be giving a speech at UCLA, so I ring up my old friends at the UC San Diego campus newspaper with a proposition: I will cover both events for you in exchange for a little walking-around money. 

And so it came to pass that I showed up in Westwood, in a suit and tie, since that's what I assumed respectable journalists covering a presidential appearance would do.

Covering the Regents meeting was a breeze — it's a public meeting, so any idiot can show up, suit and tie or not. Getting into Bill Clinton's speech at Pauley Pavilion proved to be a more difficult task. It turns out you cannot just show up where the president is speaking and ask to be seated — this sort of thing takes the kind of advanced notice so that people can check up on you and make sure you're not some sort of maniac.

Nevertheless, I wasn't about to give up any sort of percentage of my walking-around money by missing the assignment. So I proceeded to use every last ounce of my limited charm on the nice older ladies handling the entrance for accredited press. Oh, there were missteps — when asked if you have any sort of ID, saying "Well, I have a driver's license, and a credit card" is not going to convince people you're a professional — but eventually, my persistence paid off, and I was waved through to what I thought was the press seating.

Only it wasn't — it was a scaffold just above the floor of Pauley Pavilion for photographers and cameramen to capture photos and video of the president's remarks. That's great for them, but not so good if you're a reporter who just wants to jot down notes. For starters, there's no place to sit, and more importantly, those camera-people are jostling each other — and you — for position.

The scaffold was perched just below the upper level of Pauley Pavilion, where good seats were still available. Ever resourceful, I decided the solution to my problem was to climb up the railing and into that upper deck — even in a suit, the 8-foot climb wouldn't be too much of an ordeal. And indeed, I handily scaled up the bars for the promised land of a dedicated seat.

It was only as I was flinging my leg over the top railing that a thought quickly occurred to me: Pauley Pavilion was packed with Secret Service agents looking for any sign of things being out of order. And a guy wearing a suit climbing up a railing and carrying a notebook — possibly containing a written list of his grievances against the government — would seem to fall in that category. 

I froze for a moment, wondering if instead of reporting on an event, I was about to become the lead item. But after a few seconds passed without the unmistakable report of a sniper's rifle, I resumed my climb and found a seat — not all that far off from former LA mayor Tom Bradley, as it turns out. Who'd he piss off to get stuck next to me?

I like to think that in the post-mortem of that UCLA event, the Secret Service agent in charge of securing Pauley Pavilion read his underlings the riot act about letting an uncredentialed young adult, dressed as if Spider-Man had swung through the Men's Wearhouse, crawl all over a secured area. And from that point forward, the Secret Service resolved that all future presidential appearances would be handled by the book, even if it meant gunning down Mr. Met in front of a stadium of fans.

So my apologies, Mr. Met, if my shenanigans in 1994 contributed in any way to your discomfort three years later. Though given the Mets' start to this season, I'm guessing you would welcome that sniper shot at this point.

People write things. I read them and then share the links with you. That's the Philip Michaels guarantee.

I make another appearance on the Lions, Towers and Shields podcast, this time on an episode discussing 1945's Scarlet Street. I know my way around film noir, and I've seen my share of Fritz Lang pictures, but I have to confess, this is the first time I've ever watched Scarlet Street. It's got some strong performances, particularly from Edward G. Robinson as the sad-sack sap whose life is thrown into turmoil by a femme fatale and Dan Duryea in the Dan Duryea Plays a Creep role, even if the picture's not always a fun watch. 

If you like your noirs unsentimental and your endings bleak, this might be the picture for you. If you like your podcasts about noirs to be full of smart and quippy analysis, then go listen to Lions, Towers and Shields episode #139.

And that's the Phil for this week — thanks for reading. That was probably more words than either of us are comfortable with, but what was I supposed to do — short-change Mr. Met? He's been through enough.