Numlock News: September 22, 2026 • Noisy, Noovie, Cucumber

Sep 22, 2026

By Walt Hickey

Noovie

National CineMedia, which was launched by major movie theater chains to sell ads before movies, announced that it will buy Captivate Holding, which is the company that puts ads in office elevators and lobbies. NCM emerged from bankruptcy after COVID-era disruptions, and while original owners AMC and Cinemark no longer have an ownership interest, the company is still responsible for the Maria Menunos-hosted Noovie movie trivia preshow that plays when you arrive way too early to the movie theater. With this $275 million deal for Captivate, NCM is angling to capitalize on yet another moment when a bored person can be plied with a softball trivia question in a tedious, liminal moment before they’re plied with an ad, mostly because they’re not really sure if it’s even worth taking their phone out.

Erik Hayden, The Hollywood Reporter

Scheme

Amway Corp and two affiliates will pay the Federal Trade Commission and the state of Washington $225 million to settle allegations that the multilevel marketing company and its affiliates made deceptive claims about how much money new participants could reasonably make. As it happens, most of the people who joined the affiliates after 2020 would go on to spend more money on training and Amway’s products than they actually made selling the products with their training. It is the largest settlement in an FTC action against a multilevel marketing company.

Jody Godoy, Daphne Psaledakis and Ismail Shakil, Reuters

Fakes

A London man was found guilty and sentenced to over three years in prison for orchestrating a counterfeit vinyl record operation, including two years and eight months for copyright breaches of 108 artists. The operation produced fake vinyl copies of albums and then flipped them through online marketplaces like eBay and Discogs; from 2017 to 2024, the operation generated 2,743,000 pounds in profit, and upon the execution of a search warrant in 2024, the Phoenix of Vinyl was busted with 2,791 vinyl records, lacquers and pressing equipment.

Thomas Smith, Billboard

MLB

As the Major League Baseball regular season approaches a close, the changing of the guard in team broadcast booths continues; this year, three radio or television broadcasters with at least 30 years of tenure will leave their roles, including the San Francisco Giants’ Mike Krukow, the Mariners’ Rick Rizzs and the New York Mets radio voice Howie Rose, who will leave after 32 years in the booth. This kind of thing is naturally cyclical; from 2003 to 2013, 12 different voices with over 20 years of experience left the booth. Still, there’s a ton of continuity among broadcasters; the current longest-serving active English-language MLB TV or radio announcer is Denny Matthews, who has been calling Kansas City Royals games on the radio for 58 years.

Neil Paine, Neil’s Substack

Yongsan Garrison

Following World War II, the United States military occupied the Yongsan Garrison in the middle of Seoul, and it wasn’t until 2018 that the forces moved into a new base in Pyeongtaek, returning 2.43 million square meters of prime real estate in Seoul to the South Korean government. That return was brokered in 2004, and in 2007 the National Assembly passed a law stipulating that the land be made into a large park, with the city looking for its own version of New York’s Central Park. That said, a new fight has erupted as affordability advocates want some of the land to go to housing. If just a fifth of the park’s land is converted into housing, the city might be able to build 60,000 units, which would be a relief given that Seoul condo prices were up 13.8 percent in June, and rents were up 1.3 percent.

Kim Jaewon, Nikkei Asia

Noisy

The maximum recommended occupational exposure time for 85 decibels of sound — which is about the sonic intensity of heavy traffic — is eight hours, and for every additional three dBA, that exposure time is cut in half. So, 88 dBA is recommended for four hours, 91 dBA for two, and at 100 dBA — basically a loud lawnmower, or a mediocre sporting event — only around 15 minutes. Noise exposure adds up over the course of a day, and can become a public health problem if it gets out of hand.

Laura Coco, The Conversation

Cucumber

Marine biologists who revisited a reef 24 years after an initial DNA sampling were astounded to find that an endangered sea cucumber — the black teatfish sea cucumber, to be specific — may have a lifespan that exceeds 100 years. It had been thought that the sea cucumbers might be able to live beyond the 10 or so years that had been commonly assumed. Scientists collected samples from 55 of the animals from a no-take zone of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, compared them to the DNA of specimens collected 24 years ago from the same place and then modeled their lifespan accordingly. Fully 33 of the specimens — 60 percent— were the same as those sampled back in 2000, indicating that they have very low natural death rates, live for at least 24 to 27 years on average and, given how little some of the recaptured animals had grown over the 24 years in question, may live for more than 100 years.

Australian Institute of Marine Science

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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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