By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Funko

Funko, the bobblehead company that mints statues out of all manner of pop culture ephemera, reported a 6.4 percent decline in sales, moving $292.8 million worth of tchotchkes in the quarter. Turning pop cultural intellectual property into bobbleheads is still a remarkably profitable business — the company had a 40.9 percent profit margin — but still, sales have slipped, with sales of its core product down 2.3 percent and its Loungefly business cratering 17.6 percent. Like many media companies in a tight spot, the company is turning to sports to prop up its balance sheet, launching a NFL collab.

James Zahn, Toy Book

Monkeys

Of the 43 monkeys that escaped from a South Carolina medical research facility last week, a sizable if diminished group remains loose. On Sunday, 24 of the monkeys were captured, which followed the capture of a single monkey on Saturday. The monkeys have spent their time exploring the immediate region around the facility as well as cooing at the monkeys that remain inside, presumably to coax them out of their confinement and encourage them to seize their liberty. The monkeys pose no risk to health — that is, until an agent can be sent to teach them how to go to ground and understand the principles of (sigh) gorilla warfare.

The Associated Press

Whales

Over the course of the twentieth century, humans killed about 3 million whales, or 99 percent of the population the world over. This is devastating for a lot of reasons, but in many ways we’re still living with the ramifications of their elimination. One of these is simply that there are far fewer whales producing poop that, in such enormous quantities of deposited nutrients, has the ability to stimulate entire microscopic ecosystems, make the ocean more productive, and sequester carbon. The plumes of excrement have nutrients in concentrations three to seven times as much as typical seawater. Phytoplankton consumes 22 megatonnes of carbon dioxide annually, and when they die they sink and can lock away carbon long-term. New research wants to find out how best to chemically imitate a plume of whale excrement, so that potentially researchers can imitate the effect synthetically.

Sandy Ong, Hakai Magazine

Labels

Globally, the market share for independent record labels is up to 46.7 percent of the music business as of last year. Of that, true independent labels accounted for 40.8 percent of the market, while artist-direct distributors — things like Ditto Music and TuneCore that let independent artists get their stuff onto streaming services — made up a 5.9 percent share, with the rest of the balance (53.3 percent) belonging to the three companies that constitute the major labels. That said, that’s globally; domestically, the majors have a 64.3 percent market share, with indies getting just 35.7 percent of the market.

Glenn Peoples, Billboard

Army

The United States Army has been in a recruiting rut, but has begun to pull out of it by offering a trial program called the Future Soldier Prep Course. Essentially, lots of people who wanted to join the military were unable to do so because they failed the physical or academic test, so the army has started offering a prep course to help them pass. Of the 55,000 people recruited into the Army in the year ending September 30, 13,000 of them, or 24 percent, had gone through the prep course in order to get in. The course teaches both fitness as well as basic math, English, and other academic skills, and most of the people who go through it are going through the academic course rather than the physical fitness one.

Lolita C. Baldor, The Associated Press

Cheese

A theft of cheese made national headlines when 950 truckles of cheese was stolen from Neal’s Yard Dairy in the United Kingdom by an individual posing as a buyer. It’s a high-profile instance of a fairly common crime related to the smuggling, counterfeiting and theft of food, which costs the global industry $30 billion to $50 billion a year. Part of it is that food is, as old as history, valuable, but is only getting more so amid rising prices for food. In the U.K., the price of a kilogram of cheddar rose sharply in 2022, standing at £8.54.

Dan Saladino, BBC News

Private Plane

A new study found that carbon dioxide emissions from private jets reached 15.6 million tonnes of CO2 last year, a 46 percent increase from 2019 to 2023. Overall, private jets serve a mere 256,000 people, roughly 0.003 percent of the global population. According to the research, half the trips were less than 500 kilometers and lots of them were empty, just flying from one place to another with a delivery or en route to a pickup. The private jet industry is projected to grow, with the 26,000 aircraft in the private fleet expected to rise by a third by 2033.

Agence France-Presse

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