Numlock News: June 27, 2023 • Wes Anderson, Pickleball, Sriracha

Jun 27

By Walt Hickey

It’s 120 days until my book launches! I just got my hands on an early copy, and this thing is gorgeous. Early preorders are really, really helpful, get a copy today at your local bookstore or wherever books are sold!

Wes

While the various superhero films were duking it out at the top of the charts, this past weekend also saw the biggest-ever weekend for a Wes Anderson movie, with Asteroid City bringing in $9 million across 1,675 theaters after a small opening the week prior in six locations. That beat out Anderson’s previous best weekend, the fourth weekend of Grand Budapest Hotel, which made $8.5 million that weekend. About 64 percent of moviegoers were under 35, about 66 percent were men, and I presume 100 percent were unique and visually striking individuals with a complex set of peccadilloes that nevertheless endears them to audiences the world over, especially when assembled into a large group of equally unique people.

Jill Goldsmith, Deadline

One Remains

A bill regulating gas stations in Oregon passed the Senate 16-9 which will end the state’s practice of requiring an attendant to pump gasoline, not the drivers, meaning that New Jersey remains the last state standing after outlasting all you gas-pumping suckers. The bill requires gas stations to staff half their pumps, meaning that the rest can be used by drivers to pump their own gas. The bill passed the Oregon House in March and now goes to the governor’s desk, where Gov. Tina Kotek will have the opportunity to crown New Jersey as best state. Despite the move, experts say that Oregon will continue to retain its status as “the weirdest state” due to ample reserves of oddity in the Portland region.

Elliot Njus and Jayati Ramakrishnan, The Oregonian/OregonLive

Sake

Sake’s popularity in Japan is waning, with sales down 53 percent as of 2018 compared to 1989, due to a whole bunch of new competitors and a growing reputation of sake as a drink preferred by older people. This has sent sake producers scrambling, and their eyes have locked on a promising new consumer base: exporting it to Americans. The U.S. is the top country for sake exports, imbibing 9 million liters in 2022, up 102.9 percent year over year, with $76.4 million worth of it sent to the States. It’s still a fraction of the alcohol sold in the United States, but increased interest in Japanese culture in the U.S. is fueling an interest in Japanese beverages, so the line’s going up.

Shana Clarke, Vinepair

Pipe

As part of the deal that greenlit the Inflation Reduction Act, the feds broke through a regulatory logjam and greenlit the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a natural gas pipeline that will connect northern West Virginia to the Transco pipeline in Virginia. The final permit was delivered on Friday, but one issue is that some of the pipe itself has been sitting outside in the elements for as long as six years, as the developers bought it well before the project was approved. The teal coating on the pipe — Scotchkote FBE 6233 — is designed to prevent corrosion over the course of decades, but it’s designed to be buried in the ground and not out exposed to the sun for years. The outermost layer is beginning to crumble, and its maker 3M says it shouldn’t be exposed to the elements for more than a year. From 1998 to 2017, 18 percent of pipeline accidents were caused by corrosion.

Mike Soraghan, E&E News

Farming

Junk websites designed to scum search and traffic social internet through mass-produced AI-written pieces for the sole purpose of bilking money out of advertisers are becoming a persistent problem, and the companies that advertise on the internet are getting ticked. According to the Association of National Advertisers, 21 percent of ad impressions in a recent study went to such made-for-advertising sites, a $13 billion waste annually. According to NewsGuard, a company that hunts down these low-quality sites, generative AI is letting the genie out of the bottle, with the company discovering something like 25 new AI-generated sites every week, including 217 sites across 13 languages discovered since April.

Tate Ryan-Mosley, MIT Technology Review

Sriracha

The Sriracha shortage is in a dire position, with a massive secondary market for the Huy Fong Foods staple hot sauce emerging amid a rapidly diminishing supply. The company uses 50,000 tons of chiles a year to produce Sriracha, and a severe drought and water shortage amid the Mexican suppliers of those chiles means that the hot sauce company is suffering from a devastating shortage of raw material. Some Sriracha was produced last fall, but as it stands there are no estimates for when supplies will return.

Nathan Solis, The Los Angeles Times

Pickleball

A new analysis out of UBS Group cites the emerging sport of pickleball as a potential driver of sports-related injuries among its often older player base, estimating that in 2023 about $250 million to $500 million in healthcare costs will be attributed to pickleball injuries. That stems from the estimate that a third of players who play over eight times a year are seniors, coupled with a 2021 study of pickleball injury rates that found a rate of 0.27 percent of pickleball players end up in the ER due to their passion, mostly related to strains, sprains and fractures. Given 22.3 million players, that led them to estimate 67,000 ER visits, 8,800 outpatient surgeries and 4,700 hospitalizations, the bill for which would come out to $377 million in medical costs.

Joe Weisenthal, Bloomberg

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