Numlock News: May 27, 2025 • CosMc, George Lucas, Lilo & Stitch
By Walt Hickey
For the next week, we’re celebrating Numlock’s seventh anniversary! The newsletter is still going strong seven years in, and that’s thanks to the many readers who pay to subscribe to the newsletter.
Lilo & Stitch & Tom
In a pleasant box office shocker, Lilo & Stitch set a Memorial Day weekend record, making $183 million domestically through the long weekend, shattering expectations and becoming the second-largest four-day holiday weekend opening ever after just Black Panther, which opened over Presidents’ Day. With an additional $158.7 million abroad for a $341.7 million opening, it’s one of the biggest debuts ever for a live-action Disney remake. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the punctuation-intensive newest installment in the acclaimed franchise, made $77 million over the holiday weekend and became the highest-grossing entry in that franchise.
Connected
Greece has just completed work on an undersea power cable that connects the island of Crete to the mainland’s power grid. It is the first stage of an ambitious expansion to the Eastern Mediterranean’s power grid, eventually extending to Cyprus and Israel. It’s an attempt to get the island — which is currently dependent on fossil fuels for power generation — linked to the renewable-rich grid of mainland Europe. The power cable, named the Great Sea Interconnector, is 330 kilometers (205 miles) long and costs 1 billion euros (US$1.14 billion) to build. It was a process that had to be carried out with great care; not only was it complicated by financial disagreements and maritime disputes with Turkey, but the last time Crete got involved in a massive subterranean public works project, a minotaur got trapped in it, and it was a gigantic pain to fix.
Derek Gatopoulos, Associated Press
Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
I am a simple guy who admires simple pleasures, and top among them is “a movie director gets a little in over his head and we get to watch it.” This is my favorite thing: the intoxicating cocktail of ambition, talent, fortunes, bombast, risk and hubris that keeps the world spinning. Film history is filled with countless examples of audacious auteurs attempting to reach beyond their grasp, such as George Lucas’ shoot of Star Wars, Francis Ford Coppola’s troubled shoot of Apocalypse Now, Werner Herzog dragging a boat up a mountain in the jungle for Fitzcarraldo, Francis Ford Coppola’s worrying shoot of The Godfather: Part III or even Francis Ford Coppola’s distressed shoot of Megalopolis. Clearly, these attempts often work out to be great movies. It’s been 15 years since George Lucas proposed a museum drawing on both his extensive collections of physical media as well as Lucasfilm’s mighty archives, and eight years since it broke ground in Los Angeles. However, as the museum prepares to launch next year, Lucas has parted ways with its director and chief executive, taking the reins himself, reportedly. Though the museum’s costs are believed to grow beyond $1 billion and delays to construction, the museum hopes to open next year.
Robin Pogrebin, The New York Times
Posture
Poor posture can have debilitating effects on the body, in part because our heads are weightier than we give them credit for. In a straight-up, neutral position, the head exerts 10 to 12 pounds of pressure on the cervical spine. When it’s tilted at a 15-degree angle — you know, like the one that your head is probably at right now, cut it out — it becomes 27 pounds. When it’s at 45 degrees, or “cellphone viewin’ angle,” that force grows to 49 pounds; so again, if that’s you right now, do straighten up.
Kate Murphy, The Wall Street Journal
CosMc
McDonald’s launched a beverage-oriented spinoff in December 2023 called CosMc’s, which allowed the company to test new beverages while also exercising restraint on the number of expensive vowels in their restaurant’s name. McDonald’s announced on Friday that it will be closing all the standalone CosMc’s locations — there appear to be only five — but will be taking some lessons from the exercise by folding some of the beverages into McDonald’s locations. Menu options at the obsolete restaurants included latte options like Vanilla Matcha, French Toast Galaxy, Oat & Honey Moon and Turmeric Spice. They also included something called “Island Pick-Me-Up Punch,” which I must say is a fascinating menu option for stores that exist exclusively in Texas and Illinois. The attempt did have a purpose; McDonald’s has about 10 percent market share in the coffee business, and was looking to find angles into other drink industries without having to force 13,600 U.S. locations to make weird custom lattes when most can barely keep a McFlurry machine running.
Pav
Pav is a soft and fluffy bread made in wood-fired ovens in Mumbai, becoming a specialty in the region and an inexpensive street food institution. The bread is of Portuguese origin, but has made its home in Mumbai’s cosmopolitan food scene and integrated well with more local traditions. Pav is in trouble, though, since in February, the government announced wood-fired bakeries would be banned within the next six months. This announcement comes as an attempt to rein in air pollution in the city. According to the Bombay Environmental Action Group study that prompted the move, wood-fired ovens were responsible for 3 percent of particulate matter pollution in the city. This has some circles arguing the city is picking on the little guy, while others point out that 3 percent is indeed kind of a lot for ovens alone.
Oil!
Since Monday, oil majors Exxon and Chevron have been locked in a high-stakes arbitration battle over the fate of an ocean’s worth of oil right off the Guyana coast. Last year, Chevron spent $53 billion to buy Hess, which has a 30 percent stake in an 11 billion barrel discovery of oil and gas belonging to the South American nation of Guyana. Exxon alleges that it has contractual rights to pre-empt the bid and has delayed the deal for 18 months in doing so. Hess’ share of the Guyana fields could be worth $40 billion. The project in Guyana — operated by Exxon, Hess and China’s Cnooc — is today six oil-production vessels pumping 650,000 barrels a day, which aims to reach 1.3 million barrels a day by 2027.
Collin Eaton, The Wall Street Journal
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I’m gonna make my teenager read that bit about the weight of his head every morning. I keep telling him he’s going to grow a horn on the back of his neck…