Confounding Fathers

Scott Hardie | June 21, 2026
First of all, here's wishing a very happy Father's Day to all of the dads out there of all sorts! I know it's slightly jarring to launch a goo theme today that is named after an expression of defiance against non-biological parentage, but the theme was already in the works and the chance to line it up with a start date on the holiday was too good.*

That theme is of course You're Not My Real Founding Fathers! 🇺🇸 I had the idea for this patriotic theme years ago and never got around to making it until now. Regardless of how one feels about the current president, or the direction or conduct of the country, the occasion of America's 250th birthday is simply too big of a cultural event to pass by without some kind of acknowledgement in the game, and so I dusted off the old idea and got busy.

Settling on just 7 goos, or a two-week theme of 14 goos, or even a month-long theme of 31 goos, was not enough. There are just too many good options out there, and that's with the self-imposed limitation of no more than one goo per Founding Father. Thus, I settled somewhat arbitrarily on 50 goos for fifty states. To be really clear, that doesn't mean one goo per state, as in there will be one celebrity from Hawaii and one from Alaska and so on; it just means that I needed to settle on a total number around that many. Because that's so many goos, I decided to go the extra mile and decorate the theme page, as well as the Current Goos page for the next 50 days. I should decorate for special occasions more often.

I hope that this theme winds up being a fun one to play. I certainly had fun making it. Feedback is welcome.

Please forgive me if I'm a bit reluctant also to ask how you're feeling on the occasion of America's 250th. It's not that I don't care or don't want to know, no matter how negative it might be; I definitely do! It's that I'm wary of this discussion quickly becoming nothing but intense negativity, because that's what seems to happen anywhere else I wander online. 🙁 That's the same reason why I rarely bring up current events on Tragic Comedy, at the risk of this site becoming even more of a ghost town. If I want very negative opinions about the way things are going, I can find millions of them in thousands of other web sites; I personally have no further use for them here. But having said that, the floor is open to whatever anyone wants to express about the subject, positive or negative or otherwise. I care about your opinions because they're your opinions; everyone on this site is a friend who matters to me, and one of your thoughts is worth a million from strangers.

*Actually, the theme was first intended to begin on June 12 so that it could end on July 31 after fifty goos. I was under the impression that the Samuel Adams brand of beer was named after the brewer Samuel Adams Sr., father of the more famous Declaration-of-Independence-signing statesman Samuel Adams Jr., and so I planned to make a goo of Sam Sr. to run on June 21 with a clue saying something like "happy Father's Day to a father of a Founding Father." But then I discovered that 1) Sam Jr. was also a brewer, 2) the beer is named after Sam Jr., and 3) there aren't any pictures of Sam Sr. anyway. So hey, this theme is educational even for me. 🙂 I abandoned that plan for Sam Sr., but I still wanted to do something with the theme on Father's Day because, come on. So here we are, launching the theme today. It will run a few extra days into August as a result of the schedule shift.