The Price Of Milk: Wordle Double, Oil, And Trouble

The app called Wordle! that sits atop the iOS app charts in the UK, the US, and Australia isn't the one you think it is - this one is the truly original app with that name, first uploaded five years ago, and which features different gameplay to the one recently acquired by The New York Times. It's no clone - while a bazillion copycats are being removed from the App Store, the creators of the two most famous Wordles have ended up working together to allow proceeds from the exclamation-point version to be donated to a jointly-decided charity. It's actually a pretty nice story, but there's got to be a ton of very confused people who have ended up with a different app than they planned.

Elsewhere - as is required by Australian law - Midnight Oil's latest album 'Resist' has taken its rightful place at the top of the charts down under. You should listen to that record by the way, it's brilliant. It also features that rarest of things, angry old men making total sense.

Finally, it's been a week where culture reflects tragedy as well as trends. With QLDTraffic and Flightradar24 Flight Tracker at the top of the UK and Australian Android charts, we can see how people are turning for support and information from places they might usually turn for mere entertainment as a result of the terrifying flooding in Queensland and the horrifying Russian invasion of Ukraine.

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?? Wait, WTF is this?

If this is your first time here... I recently realised I didn't know what was "Number 1", not in music, streaming, film, anything really. I also realised it's really time-consuming to find out, so I pulled together some (pretty lo-fi) tech that compiles the top-ranking bits of content from charts around the world - the most popular, the highest selling, the most played, and the most binge-watched pieces of the zeitgeist. It's called?The Price Of Milk?in honour of all those politicians who got called out on TV for not knowing what everyday things cost, and I'm using it as a cultural crib sheet each week, a quick check-in on what's popular around the world. If you think it's useful, you can sign up to this as a weekly newsletter - none of my dumb opinions, just what's topping charts based on published data. No spam, no selling, not ever, I promise.