Soccer Idiots Agree: The USWNT Is Cool, VAR Is Not

It’s Independence Day, the day on which every American feels especially proud to be American, which also now means every taking it upon yourself, as an American, to make sure that every other American is behaving in a suitably proud way re: how American they are. In real life, this holiday mostly resolves to hanging out, eating grilled things outdoors, and either perpetrating or observing recreational firework explosions. Elsewhere in the culture, it sucks just as much as everything else in the culture does. But the Deadcast doesn’t play that shit. We like this holiday, we like controlled backyard ordnance blasts, and we are not afraid to go ahead and talk about it even while everyone’s outside eating hot dogs.

And so, on this national day of rest, Drew and I decided to do the American thing, which was work—that is, talking about a bunch of shit we don’t really know that much about but are more than capable of getting exercised over. In this case, that meant our brilliant, weirdly stressful, and vexingly conservative U.S. Women’s National Team, which is in the World Cup Final, as well as the atrocity that is VAR. It also meant the NBA’s hectic and thrilling free agency period, which sent two terminally online basketball geniuses, one of whom might be a team-destroying virus, to the Brooklyn Nets; utterly made over the Sixers; and is still waiting on Kawhi Leonard’s willingness to endure Drake’s sales pitch and horny timepiece before giving his grudging assent and sealing the offseason as whatever it will be. That’s a lot of sports for early July!

We also made time for not-sports. In this case, that meant a Funbag haul that challenged us with questions about just how lame parades actually are, whether billionaires bother having health insurance, the advisability of trying to eat acorns as a non-squirrel, and how one winds up in Donald Trump’s phone. It’s a salute to America all right, at least in the sense that we found a way to get upset about some stuff that doesn’t really matter.

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