By Walt Hickey

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Bearskin Caps

The iconic tall hats worn by guards outside of Buckingham Palace are made from actual bear fur, and they are getting pretty expensive. New data obtained as part of a records request from PETA found that the cost of the hats in the King’s Guard has increased from £1,560 each in 2022 to £2,040 in 2023. The Ministry of Defense bought 24 new hats in 2023 and 13 new ones in 2022, and in the past decade has spent over £1 million on hats alone.

Sean Coughlan, BBC

Honey Deuce

The U.S. Tennis Association announced that during the 2024 U.S. Open it sold 556,782 Honey Deuce cocktails, the viral concoction from the event. At $23 each that’s good for $12.8 million in revenue, up 26 percent compared to 2023. Those half-million Deuces are also a vastly higher volume from previous years, and nearly triple the 201,000 cocktails sold in 2017. Given that the American tennis governing body booked $581 million in revenue last year, the Honey Deuce alone will account for something like 2 percent of all revenue this year.

Lev Akabas, Sportico

Tailings

Lately there’s been a lot of focus on rare earth elements, which are critical minerals for all sorts of high-tech materials but are generally needed in amounts orders of magnitude less than the big metals like iron, copper, aluminum and steel. Indeed, there are lots and lots of them extracted in the United States in mines; the thing is, in many cases it’s just not especially viable to separate them out of the other waste products produced by mines, so they end up in tailings ponds and discarded as scrap. For big miners, it’s just not worth it: For instance, the market for copper was about $200 billion in 2021, when the market size for tellurium was just $464 million, kind of a drop in the bucket. One solution making the rounds is the federal government establishing long-term purchase agreements for the minerals, which would produce an economic case for their extraction and separation.

Gabriel Collins, Ian Lange and Morgan Bazilian, Mining.com

99942 Apophis

First spotted in 2004, the asteroid 99942 Apophis was ranked as a 4 on the Torino impact hazard scale. That is both the highest-ever recorded on the Torino scale while also not being especially threatening, with a 4 (out of 10) indicating it’s worthy of slightly more study and poised to be a close encounter. It’s currently expected to pass close to Earth in 2029, 2036 and 2068. Well, study it we have, and a new set of calculations sought to figure out possible trajectories of Apophis in the event it was hit by a smaller object and the trajectory was tweaked, finding that a strike from an object 3.4 meters across with enough force could push Apophis into a collision course. That said, the probability of that object actually striking it is 10^–8, very very low, and the odds of such an object hitting it at the right angle to really cause us problems is 1 in 2 billion. The bad news is, the estimated chances of a collision occurring at some point and a later impact are now 1 in 1 million, which is awful, because as the researcher T. Pratchett once deduced, million-to-one chances happen all the time these days, and in fact the best way to all but guarantee the success of a chance is to say it has a million-to-one chance of actually coming to pass.

Bob Yirka, Phys.org

Folie à Deux

The sequel to Joker opens in three weeks, and the early projections have it bringing in $70 million or higher, which is actually about $10 million less than the projections headed into the first Joker and would be well under the $96.2 million that opened to in 2019. The first film was a somewhat unexpected hit, making over $1 billion and propelling Joaquin Phoenix to an Oscar. The new movie, Joker: Folie à Deux, adds Lady Gaga to the cast, and apparently incorporated the kind of musical elements that gets marketers of gritty superhero flicks extremely nervous.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Name That Tune

A new analysis found that songs that happen to contain the title of the song within its lyrics are taking their time in actually getting to the title of the song on a level not seen before. In the 1950s and 1960s, songs usually got to the title pretty quick, with some years seeing the average title appear within the first 10 words, and in the 1960s one out of every four songs literally just starting immediately with the title, like in “Louie, Louie” or “Fly Me to the Moon.” Then, we started pushing the title lyric back: By 1969 the average title lyric came in 33 words in, by 1990 it was 54 words in, and in 2024, the average song title is now arriving 71 words in.

Chris Gunther, Can’t Get Much Higher

Real

In what has become one of the single most pathetic policy implementations ever, the Transportation Security Administration has conceded it will try to push back the deadline for full enforcement of Real ID requirements for the use of drivers licenses to board an aircraft. After years of getting punted, May 2025 was the final deadline for needing a special Real ID in order to get on a plane, but the TSA published a proposed federal rule that would again push that back to May 2027. The original 2005 law mandating Real ID to get on planes will turn 20 years old next year with no sign of actually getting implemented any time soon. The complication is that Real IDs have not caught on: Only 56 percent of IDs in circulation are Real ID compliant as of January, and in 22 states that’s less than 40 percent compliance.

Kyle Potter, Thrifty Traveler

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