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Numlock News: January 31, 2024 • Manatees, BYD, Disney Channel Original Movie

Jan 31

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By Walt Hickey

Box Office

The Japanese box office hit ¥221 trillion ($1.5 billion) in 2023, up 4 percent year over year in local currency terms. All told, the number of films released was pretty much steady — 676 local titles and 556 imported titles — and held at 1,232 overall, roughly on par with the 1,278 released in the last year before the pandemic in 2019. What did change is that the performance of the domestic films hit 67 percent of sales, up from 54 percent pre-pandemic, thanks in large part to the success of Toei’s The First Slam Dunk, The Boy and the Heron and Godzilla Minus One. Even the top-grossing international feature had roots in Japan, as it was Nintendo’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie.

Patrick Frater, Variety

Parrots

The Lincolnshire Wildlife Park accepted five African grey parrots in early 2020, and intended to merge them with the existing flock. The problem is that one of the parrots swore extensively, and then the other four parrots learned how to swear and really loved it. Because the Lincolnshire Wildlife Park caters to guests, often young, these parrots have been separated and kept away from public view. Since then, three additional birds have learned how to swear and also love it. The zoo has announced plans to attempt to rehabilitate the eight naughty parrots by just integrating them into a large flock in the hopes that they are drowned out and join the prevailing culture of not screaming swears. The risk, naturally, is that the other parrots will hear them out and join their cause, at which point the zoo will have a real fiasco on their hands for the next 80 years.

Sabrina Imbler, Defector

Manatee

Blue Spring in Florida remains a constant 72 degrees Fahrenheit, so it’s an attractive place for manatees to spend the winter. It’s a natural spring, which is ideal, because the alternative is manatees hanging out near the outlets of power plants, which isn’t bad for them per se but rather runs the risk that they could form a long-lasting habit that could imperil their species once the power plant closes. There are between 7,000 and 11,000 manatees in Florida, and lots of them went to Blue Spring this year: the previous record of 736 manatees on New Year’s Day was shattered when they counted 932 manatees at the state park.

Diba Mohtasham, NPR

Disney Channel Original Movie

The Disney Channel Original Movie has reached a mythical status among a certain generation, specifically the one I am in, as a holdover from a fascinating era in children’s television and original filmmaking history. If there’s an inflection point that changed the Disney Channel Original Movie, it’s High School Musical, made for a budget of $4 million and released to acclaim in 2006. It evolved into a juggernaut: The tour grossed $33 million, the High School Musical 3 film was released theatrically and made $253 million, and within the first five years the film franchise made $4 billion. It demonstrated the potential of what were essentially just TV movies for teenagers, but also in some ways spelled the end of an era of experimentation and innovation for the series. Prior to High School Musical, 82 percent of Disney Channel Original Movies were original concepts, not sequels or franchises. After, that number dropped to 52 percent.

Matty Merritt, Morning Brew

BYD

BYD is a Chinese electric car manufacturer that has become a reluctant entrant into the global shipping industry. The car manufacturer is building a fleet of roll-on, roll-off (RORO) shipping vessels, the first of which, BYD Explorer No. 1, having entered operation connecting China to European markets with 5,000 cars aboard. It’s in part because vehicle exports is simply a new game here: BYD shipped 55,000 vehicles overseas in 2022, which jumped to 240,000 vehicles in 2023 and is poised to go higher if only BYD can obtain the means by which to actually ship the cars. RORO vessels have been a bit rare to come by because of knock-on effects of the 2008 recession, and typically vehicle manufactures will own their own RORO fleets, like Nissan and Toyota. Prices to rent ROROs jumped to $115,000 per day in 2023, up from $17,000 in 2019, hence the need to build some boats.

Zeyi Yang, MIT Technology Review

Be It So Resolved

A new survey of U.S. adults who said that they had made at least one New Year’s resolution found that so far 13 percent of respondents have kept to none of them, 28 percent to some of them, and 59 percent to all of them as we hit one month in. Most people who make a resolution do so related to health, exercise or diet (79 percent), followed by money or finances (61 percent) and then relationships (57 percent). Young people are more likely to make resolutions than older respondents, which is either a referendum on what we learn about the utility or futility of the exercise with age, or perhaps an indication that the annual self-improvement exercise ends up being so successful in the aggregate it’s no longer needed.

Shanay Gracia, Pew Research Center

My Brand

A new study looked at 134 types of beads collected from 112 sites across Europe that date from 34,000 years ago to 24,000 years ago, and then analyzed the usage and spread of the materials in question to figure out overlapping social groups based on their variety. They argue that there were at least nine distinct social groups living in Europe during the Ice Age. This is, if anything, a sign that the more things change, the more they stay the same, and as a person who is casually in a number of watch-related subreddits I can confirm that the ability to discern distinct social groups by the correlations of their preferred brands is alive and well.

Sarah Wild, Scientific American

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