Numlock News: January 31, 2025 • Dragons, Charlie Brown, Space Coast

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

One quick note! I wanted to shout out and thank Susan Stark, who has served as Numlock’s copy editor for the past three years and is moving on today. I am so grateful for her work; Numlock would not be what it is without her efforts. She’s done a phenomenal job and I really appreciate it.

Drug Ads

A proposal under consideration by the Department of Health and Human Services to ban drug advertising could fundamentally reshape the ad business, as pharmaceutical companies are major spenders on commercials. From January to August 2024, iSpot.tv tracked $3.4 billion of spending on television ads from pharmaceutical companies, up 8 percent year over year and good for 223 million ad impressions daily. The biggest spender going these days is Skyrizi, which is dropping $32 million a month on television spots for its injectable arthritis treatment. Now I get it, there’s some annoyance about television ads chock-full of side effects, but do we really want to go back to the days where the best way to sell medicine to the masses was to go from town to town as a common peddler, hawking magnificent tinctures that cure all that ails, made from the finest liniment of snake oil and treating lumbago, cords, swellings, sciatica, frostbite and chilblain, available at your nearby druggist or closest wandering mountebank?

Chris Stokel-Walker, Sherwood News

Dracarys

An iconic metal statue in Krakow depicting a dragon that is built to breathe actual fire is taking a break for a month, as the city tries to figure out why it’s been consuming way more fuel than normal. This means an expert must check the gas pipes of the 6-meter-tall dragon, which is frankly something that most should consider doing once they hit age 45 unless you’ve got a family history. Originally built in the 1960s, the dragon refers to an ancient Krakow legend where the city was menaced by a fearsome dragon that devoured cattle and maidens. It was eventually defeated by a cunning shoemaker, who gave the beast such indigestion that it drank water from the Vistula River until it burst. Now, most societies would hear that story and build a statue of a shoemaker, but who am I to judge?

The Associated Press

Hanks

Tom Hanks, the star of iconic films including Here and The Polar Express, has been collecting typewriters for over five decades, and to some notoriety has built up an impressive collection of over 300 specimens, one of the most endearing facts about one of the most famously endearing public figures. For the first time, 35 of them are actually going to be exhibited in a show called Some of Tom’s Typewriters, so if you’re in Sag Harbour, New York, you can pop over to The Church and see some pretty cool machines, including the star of the show: the Hermes 3000.

The Art Newspaper

Foam

Adding foam to the top of coffee is trendy at coffee shops these days, and at-home coffee brands are trying to crack into the business of cold foam. Coffee Mate started offering a cold foam brand last year after its market research found that 20 percent of coffee drinkers liked whipped toppings on their drinks. Since 81 percent of surveyed coffee drinkers had a cup at home in the past day, Danone — which manufactures the Dunkin’ products — is pushing out new cold creamers. In evolution, there is the concept of carcinization, where the hard-shelled form of a crab has independently evolved in completely different decapods at least five times over the course of history, presumably because it’s such a resilient and desirable form. In much the same way, it feels like coffee brands have repeatedly and independently arrived at the concept of “just sell milkshakes to adults and pretend they’re coffee,” between iced whipped lattes, the Coolatta, the Frappuccino, cold foam — you get me, right?

Christopher Doering, Food Dive

Whine

Wine, the iconic, centuries-old product of fermenting grapes, sure seems on the ropes in the United States, with Silicon Valley Bank’s annual State of the Industry report projecting that 2024 sales volume will finish down 1 percent to 3 percent year over year, which is especially bad because 2023 was a god-awful year for American wine. That said, there is a savior, but the wineries are not going to like it: RTDs, or ready-to-drink wine-based beverages, which saw sales up 29.3 percent year over year, beating out every other bright spot in the wine business. Yes, canned beverages like Stella Rosa and Rancho La Gloria are beating the rest of the industry, which I first realized was clearly in dire trouble the moment that Francis Ford Coppola decided that a preferable alternative to owning a winery was instead selling that winery and making Megalopolis.

Dave Infante, Fingers

Charlie Brown

Congratulations to Peanuts protagonist Charlie Brown, who has just cut a new record that is burning up the charts. Be My Valentine, Charlie Brown was the 13th animated Peanuts special, which aired in 1975, presumably after they produced specials about 12 better holidays. It also featured a jazz-infused soundtrack by the brilliant Vince Guaraldi, the guy from the trio, and for 50 years, an album of the music from the animated special languished undistributed — until a 30-track album came two weeks ago. It moved 2,000 equivalent album units, almost all by traditional album sales, which was good enough to hit No. 7 on the Traditional Jazz album chart and No. 9 on the Jazz Albums ranking. That said, it’s hardly A Charlie Brown Christmas, which has spent over 100 nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Kid Albums chart owing to its iconic holiday sound.

Keith Caulfield, Billboard

Space Coast Most to Host

The Space Force is set to average 13 launches per month from Florida’s Space Coast this year, which will be keeping the busiest spaceport in the world pretty much as busy as it can handle. In 2024, Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station combined for 93 launches for the military, a new record. This year, that might rise to 156, which is needless to say pretty demanding, and the agency is preparing for potential delays and the need to maneuver given a finite amount of real estate in the area.

Richard Tribou, Orlando Sentinel

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