A Bob's Life: Monday Musings

Monday, July 6, 2026

Monday Musings - July 6, 2026

1. Happy first Monday of July and the first Monday of the second half of 2026. There are 25 Mondays remaining in the year.

2. In World Cup news, the Round of 16 has been halved and two of the three hosts of the championship were eliminated: Mexico and Canada. The US plays tonight and hopefully will post a different result, although we may be handicapped in the field of public opinion by Balogun's one-game suspension reversal.

3. The Orioles completed another mediocre week and continue to play at a .400 level going 4-6 in their past 10 games. They remain 7 games below .500, are 12 games back in the division, and 3.5 games out of a Wild Card invite. They are definitely limping into the All Star break next week.

Ella with Finn
Tequesta, FL
July 4, 2026

4. Finn was the hit of the 4th of July party we attended Saturday. The party was hosted by Mary and Fran and attended by friends we had not seen in a long time due to the group's collective travel schedules. Finn was great, except for chasing after Marley, one of their cats, on one occasion.

5. There are scary things being written by our president that portend a difficult time ahead. It was reported in a piece titled, The ground is shifting beneath Donald Trump, that:

He [Trump] also reshared, earlier that morning [Sunday the 5th] at 11:16, a post that deserves far more attention than it has received. It came from an account called Geiger Capital, and it read: “Just 100 years ago, England was the greatest empire the world had ever seen. A few generations later, they are a deindustrialized welfare zone unable to stop third-world men from invading on rubber boats. Decline happens fast. Weak leaders and suicidal empathy.”

The phrase “suicidal empathy” circulates in white nationalist and far-right spaces, and it means exactly what it sounds like: that compassion toward immigrants, toward refugees, toward people who are different from you is not just misguided but is an act of civilizational self-destruction. That caring about other human beings is a disease and that empathy itself is the enemy. The president of the United States amplified that message to millions of people on the morning after hundreds of white nationalists marched through the nation’s capital.

6. Today in History. On July 6, 1957, Althea Gibson claims the women’s singles tennis title at Wimbledon and becomes the first African American to win a championship at London’s All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.

Gibson was born on August 25, 1927, in Silver, South Carolina, and raised in the Harlem section of New York City. She began playing tennis as a teenager and went on to win the national Black women’s championship twice. At a time when tennis was largely segregated, four-time U.S. Nationals winner Alice Marble advocated on Gibson’s behalf and the 5’11” player was invited to make her United States National Championships (now known as the U.S. Open) debut in 1950. In 1956, Gibson’s tennis career took off and she won the singles title at the French Championships (now known as the French Open)—the first African American to do so—as well as the doubles’ title there.