Numlock News: October 13, 2026 • Tamogatchi, Agave, Skipjack

Oct 13, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Agave

California’s wineries are struggling with a glut of wine and awful margins, as the region produces too much product and the world drinks too little of it. Some vintners are switching things up and ripping out vines to plant alternative crops, among them agave, the succulent that constitutes the key ingredient in tequila and mezcal. Agave is cheaper and also consumes less water — it costs $10,000 an acre to plant agave versus $70,000 an acre to plant grapes, and it survives on natural rainfall — but there are still risks. Key among those risks is the uncertainty about what spirit the agave will eventually turn into, as there’s very little distilling capacity in California. And due to denomination of origin, any alcoholic beverage derived from the California agave can’t legally be sold as tequila or mezcal anyway.

Redd Brown, Bloomberg

Baijiu

Kweichow Moutai was once China’s most valuable listed company as the spirits manufacturer was riding the high of a good Chinese economy with a high tolerance for lavish gifts, but an economic slowdown and a corruption crackdown have caused a sharp turn in its fortunes. Its market cap as of September was 1.57 trillion yuan (US$234 billion), down 43 percent from the record high of five years ago. They’ve even had to lower wholesale prices of their flagship baijiu brand, Feitian, down to 1,700 yuan per 500-milliliter bottle.

Kohei Fujimura, Nikkei Asia

Pumpkin

A pumpkin in Rhode Island is awaiting the final sign-off from the people at Guinness, but it appears to have set the world record for heaviest pumpkin. The current record-holder is a 2,857-pound (1,296-kg) pumpkin grown in Lymington, England that was set only a week ago on October 3; the new contender for the record weighed in 300 pounds heavier at 3,156 pounds.

Terry Chea and Mikella Schuettler, The Associated Press

Tamagotchi

Bandai reports that groupwide sales from the Tamagotchi IP exceeded 10 billion yen (US$64 million) from the six-month April to September period of 2025, and the company is attempting to mount a comeback for the toys. Launched in 1996, there were 10 million Tamagotchis sold in less than a year, as people yearned for a small, needy device that was constantly on their person and produced a pervasive level of stress and expectation for no reason, anticipating the thrilling success of the smartphone by nearly a decade. The boom fell apart by March 1999, but a 2004 relaunch of the Tamagotchi Uni featuring internet connectivity revived the format. We’re a year out from the 30th anniversary of the overseas launch, and July saw the milestone of 100 million Tamagotchis shipped cumulatively across 38 models and 50 countries.

Yurika Yoneda, Nikkei Asia

Glacier

In the middle of the 20th century, the contiguous 48 U.S. states were home to 1,453 glaciers that covered 562 square kilometers across six Western states. As of today, that total area has shrunk by 35 percent, and over that time, 398 glaciers that had been cataloged in the original assessments disappeared. That doesn’t even include the glaciers that made a slightly more dramatic exit, including the ones on Mt. St. Helens that were destroyed in a rather unconventional fashion — one where humans are, frankly, blameless — when the mountain exploded.

Andrew Fountain, The Conversation

Not A Metaphor, Please Stop Asking

The SS United States will be intentionally sunk off the coast of Florida in November, according to officials in Okaloosa County. The county obtained the historic ocean liner in 2024, when the SS United States Conservancy was unable to obtain new funding sources to preserve the ship and its Philadelphia Pier 82 landlord took it to court to remove the vessel. The country plans to sink the ship to create an artificial reef to support tourism, and since then, workers have removed non-metal items from the ship, cut holes in the body and are now finalizing plans to pull the ship 22 nautical miles southwest of Destin-Fort Walton Beach and sink it the second week of November, weather permitting.

Emily Bloch, The Philadelphia Inquirer

Tuna

The oldest definitive evidence of tuna fishing is the skeletal remains of a skipjack tuna in East Timor that has been dated to 44,000 years ago. The anglers were likely aided in catching the large apex predator by deepwater channels that bring tuna close to shore, and they’re particularly early to the catch, as most areas don’t have evidence of tuna fishing earlier than about 10,000 years ago. By 9,000 to 11,000 years ago, thousands of tuna bones were deposited in a cave in Greece over Kiladha Bay, and by 8,000 years ago, tuna bones were found all over Europe.

Emma Elliott Smith and Torben Rick, The Conversation

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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