So my younger son has been calling Columbus Day "Columbia Day," and while this seems to be a simple slip of the tongue (he still says "Orlando" whenever we see a licence place from Ontario, so he's a little malapropish), it did get me thinking. 

Columbus Day has been falling out of favor for years, especially as the impact of his trips on the native population become more well known. The rise in localities opting to celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day reflects this, and has led to an expected backlash from those who want to keep Columbus on the calendar.  Why not satisfy both sides and change the holiday to Columbia Day?

Columbia Day would be dedicated to celebrating the development of the United States and the contributions of all parties. It would recognize both native populations and the explorers who brought the New World into the orbit of the Old World. People would be free to tailor their own celebrations accordingly, though they would ideally reflect the varied and rich history of human history.

It's not a perfect solution, of course. Columbia was often used in the context of manifest destiny, which didn't go so well for native populations in the west. I could also see residents of the District of Columbia co-opting this day to highlight their lack of representation in Congress and further the push for statehood. Still, it would likely irritate partisans on both sides of the issue, which suggests it may not be that bad of an idea.

In any event, let me be the first (and only) person to wish you a happy Columbia Day today!

First it was the campaign to put a woman on the $20 bill to replace Andrew Jackson. Now the news that the planned $10 bill redesign will see a woman potentially replace Alexander Hamilton. While it makes sense to introduce a woman on a bill that's planned for a redesign, it does stick in the craw to think that the father of the American financial system will have a reduced presence while Jackson, who didn't even like paper currency, remains on the $20.

So my thought - why not have a man and a woman on each denomination of paper currency, half of each printing for each gender?

$1 - George Washington stays, of course, but is joined by Martha Washington. She's the obvious choice, both for being the first First Lady and for already appearing on a $1 note.

$2 - Thomas Jefferson remains on our least circulated bill, joined by Pocahontas. Like Martha Washington, Pocahontas has appeared on a US paper note, and like Jefferson she is from what is now Virginia, and like Jefferson she spent time in Europe (though for very different reasons).

$5 - Abraham Lincoln is joined on the fin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, for obvious reasons. I went with her over the likes of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton as the latter two opposed the 14th and 15th Amendments (for not providing voting rights to women as well as men of all races). I can understand the rationale, but it seems wrong to pair Lincoln with anyone who was against those amendments.

$10 - Hamilton stays, and is joined by Frances Perkins. Perkins was the first woman in the US Cabinet, and is still the longest serving Secretary of Labor.

$20 - for now we'll keep Jackson here, and pair him with Harriet Tubman, who won the Women on 20s vote. I'd like to think that would annoy Jackson to no end.

And if we wanted to dump Jackson, we could pair Tubman with another figure from abolition, like Frederick Douglass or William Lloyd Garrison.

$50 - If we're looking for a military counterpart to Grant, the obvious choice here would be Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, whose contributions to computer science include writing the first compiler, developing the language COBOL, and coining the term debugging.

$100 - I would pair Ben Franklin with Eleanor Roosevelt, as both played roles in international diplomacy and both were known for work in newspapers. Not the strongest connection, but I think it's enough.

As entertaining as the World Cup has been so far, the corruption allegations for Qatar's 2022 hosting linger, a specter that seems to be staying on the fringes just until the current tournament ends. That specter took center stage briefly when it was reported that FIFA had contacted the US soccer federation about taking over. That blew over after a few days, but leaves the thought: how would the US host the World Cup if it was reassigned?

Group Stage

For the eight groups, I would pair two reasonably close stadiums to host three group games each:

New England - Gillette Stadium and Rentschler Field or the Yale Bowl. Gillette is a no-brainer, as Foxboro hosted in 1994. They'd have to use the grass trays, but that's hardly a drawback at this point. The other venue would either be an expanded Rentschler Field (capacity is currently 40,000) or the Yale Bowl (which is old but a reasonable size at just over 61,000).

Mid Atlantic - Lincoln Financial Field and M&T Bank Stadium. Two newer stadiums with capacities in the high 60,000s and low 70,000s. No brainers.

Southeast - Bobby Dodd Stadium and EverBank Field. I went with Georgia Tech's home over the new stadium for the Atlanta Falcons as Bobby Dodd Stadium is open air, and I'm favoring those where I can (though the use of the Pontiac Silverdome in 1994 shows they could be used). EverBank Field hosted a pre-Cup friendly earlier this year and it went pretty well, so I'm giving them the nod. Jacksonville is also closer to Atlanta than Tampa or Orlando.

Mid-Central - Heinz Field and Ohio Stadium. I'd thought about putting both stadiums in this group in Ohio, but opted to go with Heinz Field instead. Ohio Stadium reflects the support Columbus has given the USMNT over the years and the reality that Crew Stadium is too small to host Cup games.

Great Lakes: Ford Field and Michigan Stadium. Ford Field has hosted Gold Cup matches, and is plenty big enough for the World Cup. And the idea of the World Cup at the Big House is certainly appealing. Maybe too close to each other?

Show-Me: Arrowhead Stadium and Edward Jones Dome. Kansas City gets in thanks to supporting their MLS team and to recognize Lamar Hunt's support of soccer. St. Louis, while a historically important city for US soccer, doesn't have a great venue for it. I'm reluctantly going with it for now.

Lone Star: AT&T Stadium and Reliant Field. Like Mid Atlantic, two newer stadiums with plenty of seating, as well as two cities with MLS teams.

Northwest: Levi's Stadium and CenturyLink Field. Also not particularly close, but both home to dedicated MLS crowds, Seattle especially.

Round of 16 and Quarterfinals

Also two stadiums per group, three games in total.

Garden State: MetLife Stadium and High Point Solutions Stadium. MetLife, of course, gets you New York atmosphere with New Jersey location. Getting actual New York location is a problem, as Yankee Stadium, Citi Field, and both planned soccer-specific stadiums are too small. So we do down to Rutgers to borrow their stadium, which is on the smallish side as well but larger than any other option.

Sunshine: Raymond James Stadium and Florida Citrus Bowl Stadium. You could flip these two with the Atlanta/Jacksonville pair and it would be OK with me.

Midwest: Soldier Field and Lucas Oil Stadiu. Indy can handle one game, right? Solider Field was a host in '94, and unless the renovation made the field to narrow they'd be an easy pick to host again.

Southwest: Qualcomm Stadium and University of Phoenix Stadium. OK, not particularly close, but for three games you can make it work.

Semifinals and Finals

Rose Bowl. Of course. Why would it end anywhere else? 

You've likely heard that the New Orleans NBA franchise is planning to change its nickname from Hornets to Pelicans. Some have mocked the new name, but there's one spirited defense that makes me doubt I'll ever go bird watching in the bayou. There's additional talk that the Carolina Bobcats will reclaim the Hornets name, which makes a certain amount of sense.

Personally, I'd prefer to see New Orleans trade the Hornets name to Utah. The New Orleans Jazz would ride again, and the Utah Hornets makes a bit of a call out to the honeybee, the Utah state insect and Mormon symbol.

In any case, this got me thinking of what other teams could use a name change.

MLB: the most obvious case here is the Washington Nationals, a name whose generic quality underscored the whole ridiculous process that brought the team down from Montreal. I can understand why they didn't want to revive the Senators name - and if you don't, check out the pre-1960 seasons listed for the Minnesota Twins - but there are other options. Ambassadors, Diplomats. Monuments. Capitols (or even Capitals, it's not like that name's getting a lot of use right now).

My second option here is the Cleveland Indians, which I would roll back to Spiders. 

NFL: And with the Indians in mind, my suggestion here would be the Washington Redskins. I don't mean to pile on the District, but of the few Native American nicknames that still persist in pro sports, this one's the most egregious.

But rather than go with Warriors or something, I'd go with a tribal name - the Powhatans. Their territory covered Maryland and Virginia, and there are state recognized tribes today that trace back to the Powhatans. Cut a deal, change the logo (but keep the colors, I have a fondness for the unis), make the change.

For those not looking to tackle racial and ethnic issues, I'd suggest a name change for the Carolina Panthers, a snoozer of a nickname.

NBA: The New Orleans name change is not the most needed change in the league. The team that most needs a change is the Toronto Raptors, an example of why you don't name your team after something appearing in a currently popular movie. That sort of synergy only goes so far.

Reviving the Huskies name (from Toronto's brief 1940s stint in the BAA) would have made more sense. Even if you were going for something ferocious or dangerous, Dragons or Scorpions (both suggested) would have been better. Really almost any of the other nine names that made it to the final cut would have been better than Raptors (the only one that wouldn't be an improvement was T-Rex, for obvious reasons). So let's just go with Dragons and work out a deal to mimic the Barcelona Dragons kit, which was the best thing to come out of the World League of American Football.

NHL: If we ever have professional hockey again, I would hope to have it without the Minnesota Wild, a nickname that has never made any sense to me. I get that Minnesota has all those lakes and trees and such, but I don't think that it translated well into a nickname. Or at least this nickname.

The other finalists weren't much better (I suppose Voyageurs was the best of the lot), so I'm not sure what to go with here. North Stars was pretty much perfect, so I suppose I'd suggest some sort of name trade with Dallas, who could then don whatever bovine-related nickname would work best with Cowboys and Mavericks.

The other option here, of course, is the Chicago Blackhawks.

MLS: The truly awful names of Major League Soccer are thankfully gone (though I don't know if FC Dallas and Sporting Kansas City are huge improvements over the Burn and Wiz[ards]). So while I don't particularly dislike any of the names, the one I'd tab to change is the Columbus Crew. It's not awful, but it's kind of goofy (as is their logo of guys wearing hardhats).

If they're looking to honor workers in heavy industry, well, I don't know what to go with that's not Steelers. Suggestions welcome.

No second option, none of the other names really bother me.

NCAA: I'm not suggesting a specific school to change, but am rather suggesting the retirement of a nickname: Wildcats. How lazy is that as a nickname? It's not like we have teams called the Fish or the Mammals. Even the Greendale Community College Human Beings use a specific primate. It's a nickname for a school that either can't be bothered to go with something overused and specific, like Bulldogs or something.

The closest NCAA division 1 school to me that uses that name is the University of New Hampshire, and given the lack of athletic distinction in Durham (they didn't get their University of No Hardware nickname from their smashing successes), Wildcats almost works for them. They also have the problem that they have a native feline - the Fisher Cat - but that's being used by a minor league baseball team (which should have been called the New Hampshire Primaries, but that's another issue).

I looked up the official New Hampshire state symbols to find a new nickname, and it's not helping. The state bird is a finch. The state insect is the ladybug. There are really only two options if we go this route: Bucks (the white-tailed deer is the state animal) or Granite (state rock). I don't rend to like non-plural nickname, but I do think the UNH Granite has a certain ring to it.

Dear U.S. Treasury Department:

With word that the Presidential dollar coin program has been shuttered, I'd like to think that the third time is the charm when it comes to realizing that a dollar coin, given the current state of our currency, is not going to work. I assume at some point you'll try this again (or be compelled to try it again), so with that in mind here is my plan for Making it Better: the Dollar Coin.

1. Get rid of the $1 bill.  It should be obvious that this has to happen before anything else. People are conditioned to use bills, and given a choice between a bill and a coin they'll revert to the bill. Cash registers are set up to take $1 bills, as are most vending machines (though many can take dollar coins as well). Both Canada and the UK stopped printing one dollar/pound notes to phase in the coin replacement, which took root as the bills left circulation. You don't do this, the $1 coin will never work.

2. Make it thick. The one pound coin in the UK is easy to pick out of a pocketful of change, as it's noticeably thicker than other coins. With all the focus on trying to find a unique diameter for the $1 coin, you've rejected the obvious dimension for differentiating it from other coins.

3. Throw in another obvious tactile difference. Just in case thickness doesn't seem like enough of a difference, you could make the coin non-round (check out the UK's 50p coin for an example) or go with a bi-metallic design such as the UK 2 pound or Canadian $2 coins. You could also do something with the edge of the coin, such as leave the edges smooth or use something other than the traditional milled edges. If you can get Braille on the Alabama state quarter, you can get some sort of raised design on a dollar coin.

4. Keep Washington on the dollar. I'm not particularly wedded to this - he is on the quarter, after all - but I figure this would be a sop to the traditionalists. You could also transfer future versions of the 50 State Quarters program to the dollar coin, which I figure would boost circulation, even if artificially.

5. Move the lettered Federal Reserve Seal to the $5. There is a subset of people who like knowing where their $1 bills came from - be they Where's George? enthusiasts or not - and moving the seal that uses the Federal Reserve Bank letter to the $5 will soften the blow of losing the one dollar bill.

I hope this helps, and look forward to seeing these suggestions implemented when you try dollar coins again sometime around 2023.

I'll admit I wasn't paying a lot of attention to when they formally named the government bailout TARP (for Troubled Assets Relief Program), but the name now has me thinking. If we'd taken the $700 billion and bought actual tarps - like this one - we could make one big tarp that would be 358,700,642,791,551 square miles in area. That much tarp could cover the Earth, which has a surface area of 196,935,000 square miles, 1,821,416 times. Or a little less when you consider you're wrapping a sphere with a huge square tarp. There's bound to be some waste.

As much as I'd like to avoid a depression, there's part of me that wishes we'd bought the big ass tarp.

(It should go without saying that someone should check my math.)

UPDATE! I went back and checked my own math, and found that I'd gotten it horrifically wrong. What I wound up calculating was the area for a tarp that would have 1 billion of those tarps per side, rather than one big tarp made up of a billion of these smaller tarps.

So I went back and did the math on making a tarp out of a billion of these tarps (actually about 50,000 fewer, in order to keep it a square). Said tarp would have a side of 3, 162, 200 feet, which results in an area of... 358,681.21 square miles. That would cover Texas with room to spare, which I'm sure would please a few people.

Now that the cauldron has been extinguished, it's time for a very special:

MAKING IT BETTER: The Summer Olympics

Granted, most (if not all) of these suggestions are aimed more at whatever international body runs the sport. But I imagine the IOC has some leverage here.

1. Create an audit system for gymnastics where the judges have to document deductions, and make them publicly available. This doesn't have to be real time (judging seems slow enough now), but I think there'd be fewer shenanigans if the judges were under greater public scrutiny. If nothing else, gymnasts would have data to help them know what to expect from certain judges, sort of like how baseball players know how each ump defines the strike zone.

2. Wire up the boxers like the fencers. The current judging system in boxing is probably the worst of all the current Olympic sports and is among the worst all-time. Why not use technology to put sensors in the gloves and uniform in such a way that contact leads to points, with contact information transmitted wirelessly?

Other option - use a panel of judges for each boxer and give them more time to register punches. This will cut down on the amount of work per judge, and allow for them to register combinations that the current system can't always handle.

3. Bring back baseball and softball, as the idea that both are dominated by Americans was pretty much put to rest this year. Or, if the MLB steroid issue was as much of a factor in their removal as Rogge suggested, also get rid of cycling, weightlifting and track - to start.

4. Cut taekwondo, as it needs to get its own house in order before it can continue as an Olympic sport.

5. Getting back to cycling, bring back the team time trial as a road discipline. Maybe that'll get the Tour de France to put it back in for a stage. It's always one of my favorites.

6. If we can't have baseball and softball, add in rugby. It's a popular world-wide game that the US sucks at. Like soccer.

That's all I have for now. I'm sure I've missed something, so suggestions are welcome.

For the record, I want to note that when pressed for a World Series prediction last week by a co-worker, I went with the Sox and Rockies. It may be a moot point in a few hours, but you know if I didn't mention it that'd be the match-up.