By Walt Hickey

Spiked Spice

Prometheus was a titan of Greek mythology, the being who stole fire from the gods and gave it to the shambling, pathetic wretches that constituted humanity. The act of seizing the metaphorical inspiration, the cataclysmic power shift in which the very spirit of kinetics was robbed from those who dwell above and shared with the meek who trudge the mud and dirt, this upending of the cosmic order, it was an unspeakable and irreversible blow to the hegemony of the Gods and the edicts and hierarchy of the firmament in which we are all doomed to dwell. For this, his punishment entered into legend itself, in which daily an eagle would shred his liver to bits in retribution for stealing and distributing the spark that differentiated God from mortal. In much the same way, the Dunkin’ Spiked Pumpkin Spice Iced Latte will be available in four-packs of 12-ounce cans in 27 states beginning this month, a ready-to-drink hard coffee inspired by the Pumpkin Spice Latte, boasting a liver-shredding 6 percent ABV.

Hannah Staab, Vine Pair

Tracks

Deadpool & Wolverine is the biggest movie of the summer, and it’s got a number of great needle drops that have sent streams of the classics spiking. In the week following the film’s release, *NSYNC’s “Bye Bye Bye” saw 35.8 million streams, up 879 percent compared to the prior week, The Goo Goo Dolls’ “Iris” had streams up 23 percent to 21.3 million, and Madonna’s “Like A Prayer” is up 175 percent. That’s even after the song was included in a number of trailers for the movie, which itself drove up streams 49 percent back in April.

Eric Frankenberg, Billboard

Cuckoo For Cocoa Puffs

A pair of class-action lawsuits allege an unexpected reason that people are cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs: high lead content. Two federal lawsuits seeing a total of $5 million claim that a one-cup serving of the cereal contains discernible amounts of lead following a recent report from George Washington University researchers who analyzed 72 consumer cocoa products over eight years and found that 43 percent contained levels of lead that exceeded guidelines. A 2023 Consumer Reports analysis found high levels of lead or cadmium in 16 of 48 chocolate products tested.

Elizabeth Flood, Food Dive

That’s All Folks

Warner Bros. Discovery, the once foremost studio that was taken over by a bunch of geniuses who realized that like The Producers they could make more money as a studio by not releasing movies than by releasing movies, took a $9.1 billion goodwill charge on the value of its television assets following management’s failure to bag a deal with the NBA. Analysts believe that in the absence of the NBA on its networks, $600 million a year in profits will be going elsewhere, with live games and studio programming responsible for about 7 percent of earnings. There are a few obvious courses available to the WB brass, but one strategy seems like the likeliest according to Wall Street analysts: simply hire a number of aliens to steal the talents of all the good basketball players, sabotaging the NBA, and use the empowered aliens to defeat the Looney Tunes as part of a bet. This is Business School 101.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

Balatro

Balatro is a game that combines poker with a roguelike deckbuilding game, and it’s one of the big hits of 2024. It launched earlier this year on Steam, Playstation, Nintendo Switch and Xbox, and the goal is to build high-scoring hands that make it more Magic the Gathering than Caesar’s Palace. The developer, LocalThunk, said it’s already sold 2 million units and is planning a major upgrade in 2025, as well as developing versions for iPhone and Android.

Jay Peters, The Verge

Efficiency

The early data is in, and last year 3.4 million households got $8 billion in tax credits for energy efficiency improvements, some of the first incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act. That legislation can make it up to 30 percent cheaper up front to switch to more efficient options, and that’s actually a beat on expectations given earlier projections of their expected popularity. About 750,000 of those households tapped into rooftop solar installation with the credits. Less than 300,000 got the tax credit for electric or natural gas heat pumps, which was slightly below expectations, but that number is expected to rise over time.

Clare Fieseler, E&E News

Shipwrights

There are tens of thousands of depictions of prehistoric ships in Scandinavia, with the pre-Viking forebears of the region clearly having ships as an important element of their culture. Given that these ships are made out of wood and we’re talking about the Nordic Bronze Age from 2000 to 500 BCE, we’re not gonna find many ships, as they’ve all but certainly rotted away. However, a persistent mystery is where exactly these things were being built, as no obvious shipyard remains have been found. New research argues that the shipyards have been in front of us the whole time, and we’ve just been misreading them as settlements. Known pits containing charcoal, soot, burned wood and stones have been thought to be signs of settlements and cooking fires. This paper argues that they instead would’ve been used to shape wood, given their presence on long beaches next to areas that were deforested at the time and the lack of evidence of food preparation like pottery fragments, bones or charred grain.

Richard Kemeny, Hakai Magazine

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