Numlock News: July 13, 2026 • Wagner, Musical, Bayeux
By Walt Hickey
Welcome back!
Moana
There’s a line where expense meets proceeds; it’s called green, and no one knows how far it goes. Anyway, the live-action Moana musical ain’t gonna hit it. With a bleak opening weekend of $43 million domestically and $52 million abroad (on already tempered expectations of $130 million to $140 million globally), this attempt to do a live-action nostalgia reboot for an animated franchise that was in cinemas as recently as 20 months ago flopped. An attempted brand withdrawal, to use the Disney parlance, the movie cost $250 million to make and looks to join the live-action Snow White as a movie that bombed because Disney miscalibrated the nostalgia machine. It seems the company has mined all the properties released during the nostalgia sweet spot and has been relegated to remakes of movies that are either too recent or too old.
K-Beauty
Medical tourism to South Korea has boomed so much that it’s causing shortages of doctors in fields outside of dermatology and plastic surgery, as so many MDs turn towards the hottest segment of the industry. Foreigners visiting Korea for medical purposes reached 2.01 million, up from 1.17 million in 2024. In the month of May alone, spending on medical services by foreigners was up 74.6 percent year over year, reaching 251.15 billion won (US$167 million). Lots of doctors are moonlighting in dermatology despite not actually being specialists in it; the Korean Dermatological Association indicated 3,000 dermatologists in the country, but there are 30,000 medical institutions performing cosmetic procedures in the country.
Bayeux
The Bayeux Tapestry, the 900-year-old linen that depicts the fight between William the Conqueror and Harold II of England across 58 scenes and 626 characters, has made its way to the British Museum. The work is on loan to England for the first time in hundreds of years, after a cultural exchange arranged between the governments of France, which owns it, and the United Kingdom, which has a longstanding cultural fascination with putting other countries’ possessions in its museums. The priceless artifact was securely moved in secret by trucks escorted by police guard and arrived at the British Museum 02:50 BST on Sunday.
Wings
The food chain that added the most locations in 2025 was Wingstop, with 382 new locations added last year, which brought it to a grand total of 2,586 restaurants in the United States. That’s up from 785 units when it IPO’d a little more than a decade ago in 2015. That’s good enough to make it the 15th largest food chain in the United States based on $5.34 billion in systemwide sales, behind fellow chicken friers Raising Cane’s and Popeyes.
Pointy
Tools that can puncture other organisms have evolved independently and recurrently across forms of life, from snake fangs to cactus spines and more. All sorts of vertebrates, fungi, bacteria, plants and all manner of invertebrates have unique ways (and reasons) to stab one another, and a new paper analyzed 143 species to find biomechanical commonalities between puncture tools from across the tree of life, and how the shape of the tool informs the function of the tool. While some of these tools are smooth so they can be removed and used again (like fangs), others (like the spine of the jumping cholla cactus, or a porcupine’s needle) evolved both barbed points to stick in their target and go along for a ride.
Philip Anderson, The Conversation
Delusional
A new survey found that 19 percent of U.S. adults believed they could definitely or probably score a penalty kick if they were dropped into such a situation at a FIFA World Cup match, a robust sign that Americans really need to watch a lot more soccer. That figure stood at 15 percent among women, 24 percent among men and 41 percent among 18 to 29-year-old men.
Wagner
The Russian mercenary group Wagner was largely subsumed back into the official Russian military channels, but remnants of the mercenary group have set up a painkiller drug trafficking empire in the Central African Republic. They’re moving tramadol, and tablets containing doses of 200 milligrams or more are now found across the country, consumed by fighters or miners. Up to 500 Wagner mercs are holed up on the Oubangui River in the Central African Republic, running a gold operation that is believed to be worth $180 million per year, but also bringing in cheap pills sourced from India, exported to Congo and smuggled upriver into C.A.R., where they’re then distributed across West and Central Africa.
Nicholas Bariyo, The Wall Street Journal
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Why the snark about British museums? Museums in general are to educate and provide experiences that are otherwise unavailable. So the whole point of many displays is to have artifacts from other cultures. Is Egypt trying to get back all the obelisks in Rome?
Of course with modern sensibilities, we care how new stuff is acquired, and don't approve of stealing it, though with current White House occupant, such is coming back into favor.