Euros

Congrats to Turkey – now Türkiye – and to Georgia for contesting the best match, so far, of these Euros. Thrilling stuff, especially the closing minutes.

Congrats to Romania. Congrats to Germany for rising from the dead. Anti-congrats to Ukraine, England, and (shudder) Scotland.

The French underwhelmed in their first match – except for N’Golo Kanté, now of the Saudi league, who returned to the national side after a two-year absence. He was astounding. I think he covered every square inch of grass. He made his excellent teammates, Rabiot and Camavinga, look ordinary.

If he keeps it up, he’ll be the tournament’s best player.

“But how does one stream all of this soccer, John-⁠Paul?”

Subscribe to ViX ($6.99/month); access:

• the Euros
• the Copa América (beginning Thursday)
• Argentina’s and Brazil’s World Cup home qualifiers
• the UEFA Champions League (fall, winter, spring)
• various domestic leagues (Mexican, Colombian, etc.)
• telenovelas
• telenovelas about soccer

Should you choose not to subscribe, there is some free content as well.

I am not being paid to recommend ViX.

I had an entertaining dream last night. As well as I can recall, it involved hostage-taking, jewel-thieving, and deportation to Texas under the witness protection program.

Umbrella; vermin; children; Heineken

Rihanna: “ … under my um-bar-
ella, -ella, -ella,
eh, eh.”

Samuel: “Hahahahahahahahahaha.”

A timely song, what with all the drizzle. Summer appears to be winding down. We’ve had our first notable cooling, and leaves have been peppering the ground. This is a “false fall”; but tell that to the mice, who’ve again infiltrated our mud-room: we’ve found little mounds of dirt where they’ve been tunneling. We’ve left no food for them. They must simply be sheltering from the cold.

Daniel, who seems constitutionally squirmier than Samuel (and he is plenty squirmy), has been hurtling himself out of his chair and slithering over the ground, either backwards until he gets stuck or, like a hurricane, in a spiral pattern. He leaves little spiral-paths of puke. Or he stays in his chair and rocks his legs so vigorously that it lurches, a foot at a time, across the room.

Samuel leaves out uncapped dry-erase markers, and Daniel sucks them.

I’m gradually weaning the children off YouTube, to interest them in soccer (which will be necessary for them when the World Cup is played). It helps that on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, ViX broadcasts Champions League matches. Samuel is familiar with the halftime commercials. “Drink responsibly,” he says when he hears strains of Handel, who composed the Champions League refrain.

The old couch

Some UEFA Champions League matches are free to stream through ViX Deportes.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Goodbye, goodbye to our long-serving couch – I used it the last ten years, after it was passed around by various members of my family, including myself on previous occasions. (Or so I believe; I’m not sure about that last detail.) Tonight, the couch is out beside the curb. It has become filthy and ragged, due to the children and the cats. It never was beautiful. Well, did it have “character?” No, it did not. But it did “tie the room together.”