Numlock News: February 9, 2026 • Confetti, B1, Pizza Hut

Feb 09, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Box Office

The Super Bowl is more culturally dominant than ever, which means that the game’s effect on the box office is increasingly pronounced. Before the pandemic, the weekend of the Super Bowl was generally a bad weekend at the box office, but far from an apocalyptic one, generally coming in at $75 million to $85 million across the board. This year came in at about $60 million, led by Send Help with a respectable $10 million in its second weekend. This is partially because studios are hesitant to release counter-programming against an event that has truly achieved cultural hegemony. Only independent distributors had the guts to release a Kevin James romantic comedy of a K-pop concert documentary into the yawning maw of The Big Game.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Curling

It’s curling’s time to shine, as the Winter Olympics standout — chess on ice! – is once again hitting the airwaves. Its year-round fans hope to capitalize on the sport’s prime time placement and grow membership in the 170 clubs across the United States, according to USA Curling. The governing body sees what’s happened for pickleball and wants some of that for curling; the most athletically challenging element of the game is throwing the stone, and the sport can be easy on beginners. The issue is that it’s easy to turn a tennis court into a pickleball court with an extra set of painted lines, while curling needs to compete against hockey and figure skating for ice time on rinks that don’t even feature the pebbled ice that the sport demands. That said, many clubs have begun to secure exclusive ice: about 90 of the 170 member clubs use a curling-only venue.

Chris Gallagher, Bloomberg

Confetti

Artistry in Motion is a company that handles confetti for rock concerts, political conventions and sporting events like last night’s Super Bowl, which is the big event for the company. The company trucks in 300 pounds of two-colored confetti for each of the teams to the Super Bowl. The cannons are brought onto the field with four minutes remaining and lined up around the walls of the stadium, but they don’t push the button until the clock hits triple zero. The confetti itself is made by Seaman Paper, which produces roughly 150,000 pounds of tissue paper per day, making this a rather small order for the company but a prestigious one.

Donna Gordon Blankinship, The Associated Press

Graphic Novels

At bookstores, sales of comics and graphic novels had a banner 2025, with unit sales up five percent year over year and up 42 percent since 2020. The new readers gained over the course of the pandemic are indeed here to stay, the report from Circana reveals. Sales of graphic novels for kids rose four percent while those for adults increased nine percent; manga and other East Asian comics were up 11 percent.

Brigid Alverson, ICV2

Lots Of Places Out-Pizza The Hut

Yum Brands, which owns Pizza Hut, plans to close 250 restaurants out of over 6,000 in the United States during the first half of the year, as Pizza Hut struggles to compete amid growing competition. Same-store sales dropped five percent last year, while over at archrival Domino’s, same-store sales rose 2.7 percent. It’s difficult times for a restaurant that was, for a time there, a load-bearing pillar of American literacy; globally, Pizza Hut ended the year with 19,974 stores globally, down a net 251 locations year over year. The business does really well in China, evidently, which is responsible for 19 percent of sales.

Dee-Ann Durbin, The Associated Press

B1

A new paper from a team of 37 biologists conclusively identified what had been causing a mysterious illness among a California salmon population: a lethal vitamin B1 deficiency was driving the population’s decline. Generally, about 200,000 winter-run chinook return to spawn in the Sacramento River, but from 2021 to 2024, roughly 40 percent to 50 percent of salmon fry may have died. In 2025, about 36 percent of the fry died from it. It appears that the vitamin deficiency is related to the rise of the northern anchovy; prior to about 2014, the Sacramento River chinook would eat a diverse diet of forage fish in the Pacific, but from 2014 to 2021, the population of northern anchovy surged for reasons as yet unclear. This caused problems for the salmon because the northern anchovy has a high concentration of thiaminase, an enzyme that has been found to destroy thiamine in the digestive tract of a predator. This meant that as the anchovy became a bigger portion of the salmon’s diet, the thiaminase they consumed gave the population a massive B1 deficiency, and that was killing them.

Alastair Bland, bioGraphic

Glass Cloth

T-glass is a difficult-to-produce component in advanced chips, used in reinforcement layers under or around the chips to ensure the packaging of the hardware components isn’t warped when the processors heat up. Virtually all of the glass comes from a century-old Japanese textile company called Nittobo, which isn’t able to bring new capacity online until the second half of the year. This means T-glass is currently in shortage, pushing Nittobo to raise prices by as much as 25 percent this coming year. Advanced chip manufacturing is full of these charming little materials science bottlenecks, as seen when Ajinomoto, which is best known for producing the MSG flavoring, is now a crucial link in the AI chip supply chain because they’re the only ones who make a special film that goes on the underside of chips.

Yang Jie, The Wall Street Journal

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