Numlock News: June 10, 2025 • Dinosaurs, Nerds, Weird Al Yankovic
By Walt Hickey
Turner
Last year, a regional auctioneer in the United Kingdom sold a painting listed as House by the Water in a Stormy Sky by a follower of eighteenth-century artist Julius Caesar Ibbetson for 524.80 pounds. The buyer then arranged to have the piece restored, at which point the signature of English Romantic poet JMW Turner was discovered. The painting was then actually identified as The Rising Squall, Hot Wells, from St Vincent’s Rock, Bristol, painted in 1792 when the artist was just 17. The painting will now go up for auction again at Sotheby’s with an estimated sale of 200,000 to 300,000 pounds, and has already been promised for exhibition at Tate Britain later this year.
Gareth Harris, The Art Newspaper
Clusters
A new analysis of 32 million film ratings from 200,000 anonymized users across 87,000 films sought to find overlaps in tastes for genres among the users who rated at least 20 films. Horror, for instance, stands somewhat alone, combining both challenging material and a high-adrenaline pace. Family genres like animation, musicals and children’s all had a distinct cluster of overlap, as did more thinky genres such as drama, romance, documentary and mystery. The swashbuckling genres of action, sci-fi, fantasy and thriller had more in common with one another (and comedy for that matter) than more severe war and crime movies, which had more commonality with drama.
Stephen Follows, StephenFollows.com
Weird Al
Weird Al Yankovic is embarking on a major tour this summer, the Bigger and Weirder Tour. The parody artist has not released a ton of music since the release of Mandatory Fun about a decade ago, but fans appear to remain ravenous. This is his fastest-selling and biggest-grossing tour yet, involving venues like Madison Square Garden and the Kia Forum. His tours have historically been intense shows with lots of costume changes, so much so that his past two tours — 2018’s Vanity Tour and 2022-23’s The Unfortunate Return of the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour — were deliberately stripped-down affairs, but this coming tour is the big one. This one will involve 20 costume changes, plus nine for the band, all of which will happen in at most 45 seconds.
NBA
“Short” in the NBA is anyone who is under 6’3”. In 2020, 38 percent of the total possession time went to players of this stature. In 2025, that’s down to 27 percent. The big men have remained pretty stable when it comes to their playtime, with the cohort 6’7” to 6'9” remaining steady at just over 20 percent of possession time and those 6’10” or over maintaining at around 13 percent of the season. Gaining that remaining playing share is the 6’4” to 6’6” group, which today has 39 percent of minutes.
Pizza
Pizza has seen some of the most robust inflation within the restaurant industry, with the median pizza restaurant meal price increasing 12 percent from the end of 2023 to 2024. They are outpacing burger restaurants (7 percent), sandwich joints (5 percent cold, 9 percent hot) and Mexican (7 percent). The expansion of delivery services has been a problem for pizzerias, as their once relatively uncontested hegemony at the top of the takeout space is now threatened by every other restaurant in town. The restaurants that never bothered to form a robust delivery business have been “offered” one from the likes of Grubhub and Uber Eats, whether they want one or not. The average price of a large pizza at the top five chains is $18.14, up 30 percent from 2019.
Sauropods
A new study published in Current Biology analyzed the fossilized stomach contents of a sauropod, the massive, long-necked dinosaur species that existed for 130 million years. The specific dinosaur in question, a Diamantinasaurus, lived sometime between 94 million and 101 million years ago, and this specimen’s fossilized lunch is the first of its kind. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem like the dinosaur chewed its food — which consisted of foliage from conifers, fruiting bodies and angiosperm leaves — and instead probably relied on fermentation and its gut bacteria to digest the food.
Nerds
The hottest confection in the business right now is Nerds, which was a somewhat marginal part of Nestlé’s candy business when it was bought in 2018. However, it is now one of the biggest brands under its new parent, Nutella. Back then, Nerds was earning around $50 million in annual sales, but then came the Nerds Gummy Clusters, which have become the top sugar confection in the entire business, beating out Skittles. This year, they’re on track to do $900 million in sales, which is up 1,700 percent since they were first acquired. Nerds Gummy Clusters is riding a lot of trends, crushes it in movie theaters, has seen some pickup among athletes looking for a glucose boost and doesn’t contain chocolate during an era in which cocoa supplies are volatile.
Christopher Doering, Food Dive
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This pizzaholic is sad.
I was like, "He's gonna mention that Nerds having no chocolate is important to their success ... which I know because I've been reading Numlock!"