Numlock News: July 21, 2025 • Fazits, Everclear, North Korea
By Walt Hickey
Superman
Superman made $57.2 million domestically in its second weekend, holding pretty strongly for a front-loaded superhero movie. This brings its ten-day domestic total to $235 million and its international total to $171 million for a $406.8 million global haul, so far, a box office result that has DC delighted. This coming weekend will see the release of Marvel’s Fantastic Four, which, barring the upset of the century from the Distinguished Competition, will take the top spot. International audiences have been a little softer on Supes, preferring continental pleasures like F1 and globally appealing dinosaurs in the form of Jurassic World Rebirth.
Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter
Fazits
Last year, Taylor Swift was spotted at a Chiefs-Saints game wearing glittering freckles on her face from a small beauty line called Fazit, an injection into the national mainstream that has made the small startup a large fortune. Within 48 hours, the makeup freckles racked up over $1 million in sales, a 3,500 percent spike and a third of the company’s 2024 goal. This has prompted an accelerated rollout to Target stores, positioning the company’s 2025 revenue on track to surpass $40 million.
Sharks
The small island of Réunion was the site of multiple deadly shark attacks, turning it into a hotbed of shark scientific research practically overnight, particularly around preventing such attacks. Known locally as “la crise requins” or “the shark crisis,” sharks attacked 30 people over eight years and killed eleven people. Réunion was the site of 18.5 percent of known global shark fatalities over that time, devastating the island’s tourism reputation. It prompted the French government to pump lots of euros into the CHARC research program, making the island an instant hub for research that had previously been concentrated in South Africa and Australia. Researchers tagged sharks — finding that the 46 tagged tiger sharks were seasonal visitors while the females of the 36 tagged bull sharks were locals — and identified some contributing causes to the attacks. One is the rapid population growth of people, with the population on Réunion rising 67 percent from 1980 to 2016. Runoff patterns from new irrigation systems also lowered the salinity off Réunion’s west coast, incidentally creating a great habitat for bull sharks. The research also tested deterrents; surfers are now required to wear an electric shark deterrent device. However, one study found that two of the five types of devices just didn’t work.
Art
Auction sales of paintings that cost over $10 million fell 44 percent last year and are still down this year, according to data from ArtTactic. This is a bit odd, given that the stock market is doing great — generally a solid bellwether for how the richest of the rich are doing. However, with a down market for high-end art, the two trends that had been moving in relative lockstep appear to be disentangling. One reason may be that the art market got really, really hot for a moment there: the value of art sold at auction for more than $10 million increased by 700 percent from 2009 to 2022. It is a sharp increase that was not seen for works priced below $50,000, which only experienced a 12 percent increase over the same period. One reason for the lull? Lots of the biggest buyers could finance their hobby with cheap loans, but with interest rates where they are, those loans don’t make as much sense as they did a little while ago.
Carol Ryan, The Wall Street Journal
Everclear
Luxco, Inc. makes Everclear grain alcohol, the highly spirited spirit that clocks in at 95 percent alcohol by volume. They’re now being sued by a college student who was injured at a party in May 2025 when a fireball erupted over a backyard party’s open fire after someone poured Everclear on it. According to the suit, before 2018, every bottle of Everclear had a very large, red warning on it on the front telling people to keep it away from fire, heat and open flame since it is indeed explosive. The bottles no longer have such warnings, and the suit is seeking to force Luxco to cease the distribution and sale of Everclear in Massachusetts.
Andrew G. Simpson, Insurance Journal
Trade
Cross-border train service between China and North Korea is set to resume amid a boomlet in trade between the two countries. China’s exports to North Korea increased 33 percent year over year to $1.05 billion in the first half of 2025, while imports from North Korea rose 20 percent to $210 million. Some of the biggest exports were interior building supplies (with wallpaper and plastic furniture rising sharply) in no small part due to North Korean rebuilding efforts following flooding last summer, as well as a new beach resort housing 20,000 people that North Korea finished last month.
Kohei Fujimura and Yukio Tajima, Nikkei Asia
Memorabilia
Last week, police in Westfield, Indiana, conducted two raids on warehouses as part of a counterfeit sports memorabilia investigation alongside the FBI. The stakes have become incredibly high. The man reportedly at the center of it was found dead by a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but not before posting a note on Facebook addressed to the Autographs 101 community. He claimed that he sold 4 million items, bringing in over $350 million, with much of it forgeries. That would be an enormous amount of fake autographs flooded onto the market. However, others in the industry are skeptical since a fraud of that size would be difficult to orchestrate, and official confirmation as to the extent of such a scheme has yet to be substantiated. The website associated with the business — Mister Mancave — had thousands of alleged authenticated items up for sale, and the associated eBay account showed 21,000 items had been sold.
Larry Holder, The Athletic, and Robby Kalland, CBS Sports
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You should also keep Everclear away from your mouth…