By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Lego

Goodwill has auctioned off a 14-karat Lego piece for $18,101, a solid gold version of the Kanohi Hau mask from the line of Bionicle masks. While Lego produced lots and lots of the masks, the company produced only a few dozen of the gold pieces, which were given away during promotions. The estimate is that only around 25 such pieces exist.

Nicole Carpenter, Polygon

It’s In The Game

EA Sports has secured a deal to finally produce EA Sports College Football 25, and given the surge in name, image, licensing contracts, they’re offering a minimum of $600 to every one of the 11,000 athletes who are among the 85 scholarship players in each of the 134 FBS programs, the single largest NIL deal to date. Athletes may be able to receive a bump during their college career, but at the very least the minimum amount of money needed to appear in the game has set a precedent. As a guy who onetime appeared in a video game and accrued nothing but shame, I congratulate my fellow athletes.

Dylan Manfre, Sportico

Live

Good news for the bad guys, as Live Nation reported a record year in 2023, with revenue of $22.7 billion, up a staggering 36 percent year over year. All told, profits hit $1.86 billion, up 32 percent, and attendance overall was up 20.3 percent to 145.8 million. Concerts in general are on the rise: The number of concerts staged by Live Nation was up 15.3 percent to 33,629.

Jem Aswad, Variety

It’s Back

For the first time in years, the first time since its exile from Netflix to Peacock, The Office is once again one of the top 10 most-streamed shows of the week. The program has raked in 602 million minutes of viewing, of which I can only assume 300 were spent in a cringe-induced rictus by loyal fans. Yet again, Bluey remains the most reliable week-to-week program, in second place with a laughable, disgraceful, pathetic, mere 1.25 billion minutes of viewing.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

Drunkonyms

A new study out of Germany found that the English language is a versatile and varied instrument, as there are hundreds of words and phrases in the English language that can be used as a word to describe drunkenness. The researchers found 546 synonyms for “drunk,” and most importantly, the researchers found that with a bit of momentum many English words can become shorthand for drunk. Yes, beyond sloshed, trashed, turnt, sozzled, ripped, Numlock’d, inebriated, soused, and blitzed, this versatile language will find a staggering way.

Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica

Cars

Car insurance remains one of the fastest-growing elements of the U.S. economy, with the consumer price index indicating that car insurance rates are up 38 percent since the beginning of 2020. The reasons are myriad: Drivers are more dangerous, when cars are damaged it’s more and more expensive to repair them, and many parts of the country have simply stopped enforcing traffic laws, which means that actually dangerous drivers never actually get flagged to insurers.

Marin Cogan, Vox

And The Ad Spot Goes To

ABC, which hosts the Oscars, has been looking for $1.7 million to $2.2 million per 30-second ad spot, a solid improvement on the $1.6 million to $2.1 million of last year. The Oscars remain the primary non-sports live viewership event of the year, and the audience it draws tends to err toward the expensive side. This is exciting, because the last time that corporate America got really invested in the success of Oppenheimer, it caused the Cold War.

Brian Steinberg, Variety

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