Numlock News: January 21, 2026 • Jokes, Spice, Puppies

Jan 21, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Spicy

In the United States, 95 percent of eateries have at least one spicy menu option, as soaring demand for spice spreads across cuisines. It’s a global phenomenon, as searing, savory capsaicin finds a place on menus the world over. Fueling that growth is the realization that heat works pretty well in any kind of cuisine, not to mention the rampant demand for chiles. Even we here at Numlock are not immune, as our research and development team is working on a Spicy Numlock — mainly one that activates the HDR feature in your phone, cranks up the brightness on your screen and makes it physically painful and eye-watering to consume our otherwise standard product.

Karoline Kan and Jennifer Creery, Bloomberg

The Secret To Comedy Is…

A new study compared audio from two tours of different stand-up comedians in the United Kingdom, looking at the comedians across many performances from 2017 to 2018. Using an analysis called Topology Analysis of Matching Sequences (TAMS), they were able to detect the cadence of repeated material across performances. They found that for the established comedian, on average, 39.7 percent of each performance transcript matched to another show. For the emerging comedian, only 14.2 percent of the material matched. New material tended to appear at the top of each show. In a neat analysis, the researchers were able to follow the evolution of the show over the course of the tour.

PNAS Nexus

Opera

A new analysis of opera in the United States looked at nonprofit opera companies. It found that while many opera companies are experiencing financial stress, demand remains strong despite headwinds — even as the business model has serious challenges. Those challenges are serious: opera tickets sold dropped 21 percent from 2019 to 2023, ticket revenue is down 22 percent and opera companies received just 19 percent of their budgets from donations and grants in 2023, down from 25 percent pre-pandemic. This is happening at the same time when demand for classical and opera music saw a resurgence on streaming music services, which means that it’s not a matter of interest but of business model to confront.

Christos Makridis, The Conversation

Bravio

Sony is sending its television business into a joint venture with TCL, a Chinese company. Manufacturers from Japan once dominated the television industry, but have steadily cashed out of the business: Sharp became a subsidiary of Foxconn in 2016, Toshiba sold its television unit to Hisense in 2018, Hitachi gave up on the business in 2018 and Panasonic scaled back production and pulled out of much of Asia and Europe in the early 2020s. Lately, Sony has been the remaining contender in television from the country that revolutionized the sector. Sony’s business has shrunk, down 10 percent year over year to 597 billion yen in the year ending March 2025. Sony would prefer to spend its money on anime, music and IP, so it is transferring the TV business off to a 51%-49% joint venture with TCL.

Tsubasa Suruga, Nikkei

Dogs

The Dog Aging Product is a long-term study on aging in dogs, and the volume of data it’s getting on breed temperament is already challenging notions and bringing new data to debates about mixed-breed dogs and the classic smaller vs. larger dog debate. Data from 42,941 dogs across 56 recognized breeds, as well as 23,587 mixed-breed dogs, shows a number of statistics. For instance, Chihuahuas have the highest fear of strangers, while Golden Retrievers have the lowest levels. Rottweilers have the lowest fear of noises, while Shiba Inus have the highest. Shiba Inus have the lowest attention seeking, while Pugs have the highest. Bulldogs have the lowest chasing and escaping score, while Brittany dogs have the highest.

Humberto Basilio, Miriam Quick, Jen Christiansen and Lee Lotor, Scientific American

Trails

The Forest Service manages 370,000 miles of roads and 160,000 miles of trails, but those trails are in bad shape. Only 37 percent of the national trail network sees maintenance in a given year. Widespread burnout and loss of trail staff have sent the number of miles maintained down 22 percent below average as of 2025, with the number of miles meeting maintenance standards dropping by 19 percent. This is the result of underfunding: as of 2022, estimates put the backlog of work at $460 million. Increasingly, the system is dependent on volunteers, with 2023 seeing 71,660 volunteers contributing 2.6 million hours of service to the Forest Service in an attempt to slow the damage.

Dillon Osleger, Republic

…Timing

This week, Sphere Entertainment announced that it has sold over two million tickets to its Wizard of Oz show, which opened at the end of August and has since made over $260 million in ticket sales. The company, which opened a large high-definition LED sphere in Las Vegas, is now threatening to open even more spheres. Their latest target is Maryland’s National Harbor, a trip down the Potomac from Washington, D.C., where Sphere will build a 6,000-seat venue — vastly smaller than the 17,600-seat colossus in Vegas. It will cost merely $1 billion compared to the $2.3 billion Vegas Sphere. The main implication of this venture is that, with James Dolan’s eye focused southward, perhaps the Knicks might be good now.

Kurt Badenhausen, Sportico

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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

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