Numlock News: January 21, 2025 • Soup Drops, Caviar, Mafia

Jan 21, 2025

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Soup

General Mills’ Progresso brand is rolling out a hard candy that tastes like its soups in a limited-time offering, essentially lozenges that possess the flavor of chicken noodle soup and can be purchased for $2.49 in weekly drops every Thursday. The appeal, according to the brand, is “soup you can suck on,” for those who are sick and those who, let’s be frank, are a bunch of sickos content to nibble on a calcified bouillon cube some CPG is spinning as “candy.” The Progresso Soup Drops are available until supplies are completely exhausted, not unlike its marketing department.

Chris Casey, Food Dive

One of Them Days

In an upset for the box office, One of Them Days managed to beat out Wolf Man to come in second place at the American box office behind Mufasa, an outstanding showing for the comedy. One of Them Days made $14.2 million over the extended weekend, earning back its $14 million budget in an auspicious win for an R-rated studio comedy, a genre that has otherwise been written off as dead at the cinema. Meanwhile, Moana 2 hit a major milestone over the weekend, earning $1.009 billion globally, which is damned good for a film that was originally slated to be dumped off onto Disney+.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Franken-thena

A Roman statue of the Greek goddess Athena that has not been displayed to the public for centuries will be seen for the first time next week in Chicago, following its purchase from a British family that owned it for around 260 years. It’s a neat little statue; first, a close reader might wonder why it’s Athena and not Minerva, given that the Romans yoinked the goddess for their own purposes. Good catch! The statue was originally known as Minerva — British upper-class tourists all learned Latin in school — but was wrong, because the statue depicts specifically Athena, recognizable by the Greek helmet and the aegis on the chest. Essentially when the statues were carved, the Roman customer wanted some of those classic ancient Greek looks around the ol’ domus. Second, I did say statues, not statue: It’s turned out to be an amalgam of two different sculptures, with the head from the reign of Augustus (31 BCE to 14 CE) and the rest sculpted under the reign of Claudius (41 to 54 CE), and probably had a few modern improvements in the 1800s.

Elena Goukassian, The Art Newspaper

Sturgeon

Caviar has become a massive business in Sichuan Province, China, as the sturgeon in their traditional home of the Caspian Sea are in danger of extinction due to overfishing. A thriving sturgeon farming business has emerged in the province, and China’s farm-raised supply of caviar-producing fish is now responsible for 60 percent of global production of caviar. Yaan, a city in the province previously known for its role in popularizing pandas, is a central hub of this caviar boom, with a Sichuan Runzhao Fisheries facility with 274 breeding pools covering 150,000 square meters full of some 700,000 sturgeons. The 60 tonnes of caviar per year that single company produces is now a 10 percent share of the global market for caviar.

Shunsuke Tabeta, Nikkei Asia

Mafia

For years, the Bills Mafia — the superfans of the Buffalo Bills — has played a major role in snow removal for the football franchise, with volunteers working for $20 per hour proving essential in clearing the 300 and 200 levels of the current stadium. With a new stadium slated to open in 2026, though, that stands to change, as the new architecturally sophisticated structure has all sorts of deliberate design elements built into the stadium to make snow clearance a breeze. Among the foremost is a canopy that will cover about 64 percent of seats, specifically the ones in the 200 and 300 levels, responding to fan feedback that they were fine with being cold but being wet sucks. Another is a one-of-a-kind melting system in the canopy with installed tubing containing 6,000 gallons of glycol, which can be heated to 150 F and then pumped through the stadium, taking tech more commonly found in sidewalks and pedestrian walkways and putting it into a stadium.

Eric Jackson, Sportico

Cattle Gallstones

In Chinese traditional medicine, the gallstones of cattle are considered to be valuable and used to address strokes and hypertension, ailments which are on the rise in an aging China. This has sent global demand for the gallstones up a lot, and benefiting in particular are Brazilian ranchers who are finding buyers willing to pay usually $1,700 to $4,000 an ounce (but in rare cases, $5,800 an ounce) for the gallstones. It’s become a reliable side hustle for South American ranchers — in the United States, fairly uniform high-quality feed and shorter lifespans of cows before slaughter mean the gallstones don’t really develop the way they do elsewhere — and has led to a bit of a frenzy in trying to find beasts that contain the valuable stones, as usually the main beneficiaries of the high prices are the slaughterhouse owners able to diagnose the problem the straightforward way.

Samantha Pearson, The Wall Street Journal

Aligned

Right now stargazers are in for a rare treat, with six planets — Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — visible in the night sky. On February 28, we’ll get an ever rarer moment when Mercury will be visible with the others as well. The planets complete orbits at varying speeds, so it’s tough to get the whole family aligned for a picture given the differences in pace. There are some scientific questions yet to be settled, such as whether the overall gravitational pull of Venus, Earth and Jupiter are the cause of the solar cycle, given that the alignment period is every 11.07 years and the solar cycle is 11 years. Either way, if for whatever reason matters of a terrestrial nature are getting simply too anxiety inducing, demoralizing or tedious, it’s as good a time as any to simply look to the stars.

Jonathan O’Callaghan, BBC News

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