Numlock News: February 24, 2026 • MacArthur Park, Peacock, Whinny
By Walt Hickey
Fires
A series of fires across the U.S. Plains has delivered a blow to cattle ranchers as what is already a smaller-than-usual herd faces new challenges on the range. As of Monday, the Ranger Road Fire has burned an estimated 283,283 acres and is just 65 percent contained. That’s only the largest of the fires that have burned thousands more acres in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. Beyond the direct cattle losses, hundreds of thousands of acres of grass that would ordinarily feed the cattle were burned off the plains. This will have ramifications on beef prices, which are already at record highs, notching $6.75 per pound in January, up 22 percent from a year ago.
Art History
A new survey by the Association for Art History found just 80 schools in the United Kingdom offer an A-level in art history, down from 122 a decade ago. Just 838 students took the exam last year. About 20 years ago, that was around 1,000 students; 40 years ago, it was approximately 4,000. The schools that offer art history classes are also disproportionately fee-paying. At the undergraduate level, about 1,200 students are enrolled in undergraduate art history courses. The fear is that this means the entire field of art history is shrinking, and that those who remain in it will be disproportionately wealthy.
Bendor Grosvenor, The Art Newspaper
Someone Left A Cake Out In The Rain
Olympic gold medalist Alysa Liu’s medal-winning skate to the 1978 disco cover by Donna Summer of “MacArthur Park” has got the song stuck in a lot of people’s heads, streaming data reveals. The song was averaging 12,000 streams per day in the six days leading up to the free skate, according to Luminate. On Friday, the number jumped to 115,000 streams. By Saturday, streams hit 139,000. Given that the tracking week for chart eligibility ended Thursday, we won’t see movement immediately, but there’s a decent shot that the disco hit finds its way back onto the charts.
Manga
After taking a hit in 2024, manga surged back in book stores and comic shops. After the massive surge in interest during the pandemic, manga sales in book stores fell 13.2 percent in dollar terms and 17 percent in unit sales. In 2025, though, the format returned to growth, with book-channel sales up 4.6 percent in terms of dollars and 8.1 percent in terms of units. In comic book shops, the rebound was even more pronounced, with manga sales up 33.1 percent in 2025 according to the ComicHub system. Comic shops in general were riding out 2025 just fine, with graphic novel sales up 28 percent last year in the channel.
Peacock
Comcast’s Peacock streaming service generated 14.8 billion minutes of Winter Olympics viewing through February 20. The date means the 14.8 billion minutes don’t even factor in the events that took place over the weekend. That is up 114 percent from 6.9 billion minutes streamed during the 2022 Winter Olympics. Meanwhile, primetime coverage was also up, averaging 24 million viewers across afternoon and evening coverage — up 94 percent from the 12.4 million viewers averaged in 2022.
Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News
Aye
A new study conducted a series of experiments around support for legislation with different names, asking 670 people about their support or opposition to new bills. Some of these bills were named in the standard style, while others were named after victims of incidents that the laws purported to address — for example, “Walter’s Law.” Others involved a story about what happened to the person motivating the legislation. In general, the named bills garnered significantly more support. In one of the experiments, the eponymous bill was supported by 79 percent of subjects, while the identical but generically named control bill was supported by just 62 percent. This would support assertions that eponymous legislation might result in unwarranted public support for bills, given their actual content.
Krystia Reed, American Psychological Association
Neigh
A new study sought to understand why horses sound like that, making a high-pitched whinny despite being rather large beasts that would ordinarily make sounds in the lower registers. The core reason is that whinnies are two sounds happening simultaneously, a low-pitched noise around 200 hertz and a high-frequency sound above 1000 hertz. The sound in the lower register is just standard vibrations in the laryngeal vocal folds. The higher-frequency noise was a bit of a mystery until a new study that involved a series of tests and scans on live horses, followed by a trip to a horse meat supplier for horse larynges, then a somewhat grisly series of examinations involving an air pump. Researchers found that the upper register of the whinny is a whistle that is produced within the larynx. For the love of god, nobody tell Mr. Ed how we learned this.
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If I was in some sort of Arts School, I might actually be interested in a course examining the wisdom of the Ed character….
But Wilbur’s undiagnosed schizophrenia might be an easier topic.
Meh. Not that Richard Harris was a great singer, but his version of MacArthur Park (the original) was far better than Donna Summer's, and I write this as someone who by and large liked her music.