As luck would have it

It may not be Friday but it is the 13th and that got us thinking about bad luck. You know, like the time Eddie gifted Marilyn the dreaded Fregosi Emerald. The result? A comedy of errors for the Munsters. As for the audience? Just comedy 😂

Though we all have our superstitions, much of the time we make our own luck. Or do we? Surely you’ve heard of “survival of the fittest”, but a new study suggests that luck has played a bigger role in evolution than previously thought.

This guy knew it all along ;)

Beginning this Wednesday, we’re launching a revamped version of the daily retro trivia that you can find every day at the bottom of the newsletter.

What does that mean? More nostalgia for all us ’60s kids, all new questions, and best of all, a daily prize.

Each day, we’ll randomly draw from everyone who plays and give away a $25 Amazon eGift Card to one lucky player. Yes, you read that right, all you’ll have to do is play for a chance to win!

It’s gonna be a blast 😎 

According to a report by Edmunds, 20% of new car buyers committed to paying at least $1,000 per month on their loan in Q4, driving the average monthly payment on new cars to an all-time high.

The average size of a loan on new-car purchases also reached an all-time high of $42,113 in Q4, up from $40,713 in the previous quarter.

On the plus side, the average annual percentage rate on loans for new cars fell to 6.8% in Q4, down from 7.1% in Q3 and 7.4% in Q4 of 2023.

"Although they tend to skew a bit higher at year end, the record highs in auto financing amounts that were set in Q4 are the culmination of major challenges to new-vehicle affordability that consumers faced in 2024," said Jessica Caldwell, Edmunds' head of insights.

"It's getting more and more difficult for the average shopper to walk into a new-car dealership and leave with a set of keys without feeling like they are forced to create extra room in their budget from some other aspect of life. The one bright spot is that interest rates seem to finally be on a downward trajectory, so buyers are at least getting more car for their buck rather than allocating their payments to interest."

If you didn’t know any better, you’d probably think a picture of Mercury was actually just a picture of the Moon. Just so it’s clear, the joint Europe-Japan BepiColombo mission just captured new up-close images of what is indeed the closest rock to the Sun.

Launched in 2018 by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), the mission’s conjoined spacecraft completed its sixth flyby of Mercury, using its gravitational pull to slingshot around the planet while capturing some of the best photographs ever taken of the tiny but mighty planet as it cruised through its shadow.

At one point, the spacecraft was just 180 miles above Mercury, allowing it to get detailed pictures of the canyons and craterous chasms on the surface that it likely endured during the period in the solar system known as the Late Heavy Bombardment.

Mercury is not tidally locked to the Sun, but its axis angle causes part of its north pole to be permanently dark, which is where some of the images were taken, including pictures of the Prokofiev, Kandinsky, Tolkien, and Gordimer craters.

“BepiColombo’s main mission phase may only start two years from now, but all six of its flybys of Mercury have given us invaluable new information about the little-explored planet. In the next few weeks, the BepiColombo team will work hard to unravel as many of Mercury’s mysteries with the data from this flyby as we can,” Geraint Jones, BepiColombo’s project scientist at ESA, said in a statement.

Chicago’s debut album, Chicago Transit Authority, was nearly 80 minutes long—an unheard-of length for any rock ‘n roll album in 1969, let alone a band’s debut. The band didn’t care, but radio stations did, and it certainly caused the group to stall coming off the block.

Oh yeah, and then there was the fact that these so-called rock ‘n roll songs had orchestral brass in them. Critics actually loved it, but radio stations weren’t keen on playing anything off CTA, causing the record’s two singles—Questions 67 & 68 and Beginnings—to peak at 71 and go uncharted, respectively.

"They literally said that because we hadn't had a hit yet, they couldn't play the song," trumpet player Lee Loughnane, a co-founding member of the group, said during a recent conversation on the UCR Podcast. "Wait a minute here, that's the Catch 22 here. How are we going to have a hit if you don't try it? The critics loved us, initially, with the first album. 'These guys are way ahead of their time. What do they have for the second record?' But AM radio wouldn't play the singles."

Both of these songs are, of course, now considered legendary innovations. 56 years later, you can’t go to a Chicago show without hearing extended renditions of each of them.

Whether you knew it or not (and let’s be honest, few of us did), today is National Clean Off Your Desk Day. You know who kept a tidy desk? Mary Richards 😎 

If you’re a fan of WJM’s best producer, why don’t you give today’s trivia a try? Don’t worry—you’re gonna make it after all ;)

Have a great day ahead Staker!

Trivia courtesy of funtrivia.com. Today’s issue written by Michael Cowan, Joey Cowan, and Maureen Norman.