Numlock News: April 16, 2025 • Pirates, King of France, Squirrels

By Walt Hickey

Broadway

With the window for Tony Award eligibility closing soon, it’s been a busy couple of weeks for a high-wattage season on Broadway, with several contending shows opening to a substantial buzz and remarkably high grosses. Good Night, and Good Luck starring George Clooney set the weekly record for highest-grossing play in the history of Broadway, earning $3.78 million across 8 performances during its first full week since opening. Average tickets came in at an eye-watering $303.40. While Othello starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal made $3.1 million, that theater is way smaller, and those tickets average $375.22 a seat, rendering a night out for two the same price as your average monthly new car payment. Industry grosses were up 24 percent for the week year over year and are cumulatively up 19 percent over the same period of 2024.

Caitlin Huston, The Hollywood Reporter

Pirates

According to the International Maritime Bureau, there were 45 incidents of piracy in the first quarter of 2025, thanks to a surge in pirate activity in the Singapore Straits. That’s a 35 percent increase compared to the same period last year. There were 27 incidents in the vicinity of the Strait of Malacca, which is a new and concerning trend since there were just 7 incidents in the same period in 2024. At the same time, piracy in the Gulf of Guinea off the western coast of Africa has cooled off, while Somalia remains a concern, given 3 hijackings from February to March.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Ants

Two Belgian nationals were arrested in a Kenyan county known for various national parks, standing accused of attempting to smuggle animals out of the country. The teenagers were charged with wildlife piracy after their arrest April 5 with 5,000 ants, which the Kenya Wildlife Service said was part of a larger scheme to traffic rare ant queens and other specimens to Europe and Asia, where they’d be sold to collectors. The ants included messor cephalotes, which is a large harvester ant native to East Africa. While Kenya’s fight against poachers of larger animals gets considerably more attention, this was a pretty extensive operation, as the teens were found with the ants in 2,244 test tubes filled with wool that would allow the ants to survive for months.

Evelyne Musambi, The Associated Press

Fleur-de-lis

The New Orleans Saints have used a fleur-de-lis logo since they began playing in 1967, and secured a trademark registration for the mark in 1974. However, this early and assiduous legal protection was not enough to escape a lawsuit brought by a man claiming that he and his family own property rights to the fleur-de-lis because, and this is a new one, he is “direct descendant of the Kings of France (Scotland, Aragon and Castille).” Needless to say, I fear that success in this matter and a U.S. court acknowledging the right of French kings could have had some disconcerting precedents for (and I’m just thinking off the dome here) the very concept of Louisiana. That suit, seeking cancellation of that trademark, made its all the way to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. However, it was dismissed on Monday because, among other things, the man did not show that he suffured an actual or imminant injury caused by the Saints. Injury? From the Saints? What, it’s not like he played on an opposing offense from 2009 to 2012.

Michael McCann, Sportico

Warm Up Acts

The opener band, which plays to crowds yet to mentally enter the concert-going experience, has a difficult task ahead: a cold room full of people still trying to get drinks and , with some exceptions, is mostly there to see the headliner. A gig’s a gig, but opening is inherently hard. There are perks, though: a new study looks at the touring and streaming data of 57 opening acts on major U.S. tours, including tours that ran in 2022 and 2023 playing to venues with capacities of 2,000 or more. The study tracked Spotify performance before, during and after the tours, and found that opening acts did typically see a 18 percent to 20 percent streaming bump during the tour — though some saw a 200 percent bump. However, that effect didn’t really stick as the streams leveled off to 6 to 10 percent below that top performance, and few becoming full, regular listeners.

Jeff Apruzzese, The Conversation

Fakes

A new and — thanks to GPT programs — increasingly common scam has hit the market: community colleges see waves of fake enrollments in classes by fraud rings of real people who manage a network of fake student aliases to enroll in schools, collect financial aid money and then quit. In 2024, California community colleges saw fraudulent students steal $11 million in state and federal financial aid dollars, and the state chancellor’s office estimated that 25 percent of applicants to community colleges were bots. This means that real, bona fide students who want to learn are elbowed out of classrooms that otherwise appear packed to capacity because of the bots. Thanks to LLMs — and because community colleges accept all applicants — many bots even persist into courses, squandering professor time by pushing algorithmically-generated work and preventing actual humans from getting to class.

Jakob McWhinney, Voice of San Diego

Squirrels

While many places in the world will see residents adamantly claim that the squirrels where they live are just different, that is actually the case in one place. Santa Catalina is one of the 7 channel islands off the southern coast of California, about 25 miles offshore. It has its own specific subspecies of ground squirrel — Otospermophilus beecheyi nesioticus. The weird thing is, it is not entirely clear how the squirrel got there, given the distance of the archipeligo from the main land and the fact that none of the other 6 islands actually have squirrels. Researchers used radiocarbon dating of ancient squirrel bones on the island to conclude that none of the specimens are older than 2,000 years, which from the perspective of evolution is really rather young. This points to an intriguing possibility: the squirrels had help. Genetic analysis found that the squirrels were probably introduced to the island at least 1,500 years ago and were brought there by the Tongva people, for whom the island was sacred and inhabited by the most powerful people in their society. It has been visited for at least 8,000 years.

Ashley Braun, bioGraphic

You should check out this week’s unlocked Sunday Edition with Morry Kolman, the artist behind the film MrBeast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money, the brilliant digital astronomy project First Light and the Webby-award nominated — you should go vote for it! — Traffic Cam Photobooth.

Numlock Sunday: Morry Kolman on his film, MrBeast Saying Increasingly Large Amounts of Money

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