Numlock News: February 26, 2024 • Planet Hollywood, Mezcal, Demon Slayer
By Walt HickeyWelcome back! I’m doing a bit of a seasonal sale this week; if you’d like to become a paid subscriber to Numlock, support the newsletter, get the Sunday special edition, and all the perks associated with a paid sub, now’s a great time in the Fool’s Spring Sale. Dune-ticipationA muted February at the box office came to a close this weekend, with the Bob Marley movie winning for a second consecutive weekend with $13.5 million among the last new releases before Dune: Part Two dropped. That movie has had some real legs overseas, and has so far made $120 million globally on a $70 million budget. As the world awaits the second installment of Dune, a few other movies came to market with varying degrees of success, the best-performing of which was the anime film Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba — To the Hashira Training, which made $11.5 million. Incidentally, because literally no other animation studio has bothered to put out anything for kids this winter, Migration has managed to quietly accrue $268 million globally over the past 10 weeks, not once placing higher than third in the weekend box office chart in any of those 10 weeks. Car WashWe’re experiencing a boom in car washes, which as it stands today is a $14 billion industry spread across 60,000 locations in the U.S. that has been seeing a 5 percent expansion annually, with the market expected to double by 2030. It’s an exciting time in the car wash world, as the largely automated process has seen a huge boost offering subscriptions to car owners rather than just a job-by-job business. Americans are also over washing their car themselves; the number of washes done professionally is up to a 79 percent market share as of 2021, up from 50 percent in 1996. Revenues average $1.5 million a location. MezcalTequila is an industrially-produced liquor, a spirit that is very much a product of industrialization and mass production, while mezcal remains a smaller, family-produced operation. That’s made mezcal desirable, which has of course provoked tequilization, as entrepreneurs try to find a way to scale up a beverage where the very appeal is that it’s not especially scalable. Tequila pulled off its hegemony by simply moving away from agave; in the 1970s, the minimum allowable level of agave sugars in tequila was dropped to 51 percent, and lots of tequila flavors these days come from additives to compensate. Over the course of the past decade, production of mezcal has risen from 1 million liters to 14 million liters — a fraction of the 650 million liters of tequila — and the way forward looks as if many of the things that make mezcal appealing will be rendered obsolete by massive players in the market. Prices for farmed agave have jumped from $50 per ton in 2012 to $500 per ton today. Even within mezcal there’s a range of difficulties: Cheap mezcal is made from the Espadín variety of agave, which matures in six to eight years, while premium stuff comes from the Tepeztate variety, which takes 25 years to mature and can only make a few bottles per plant. NearThe location data broker Near boasted that it had data on the locations of 1.6 billion people in 44 countries ahead of going public with a $1 billion valuation, just another sign of a market for consumer data that is red-hot. Anyway, Near went bankrupt like seven months later. This has become something of a serious issue, as the location data of 1.6 billion people in the wrong hands can have serious effects, and now a senator is asking the FTC to step in and intervene in the bankruptcy proceedings to ensure that the personal data of lots of people is not simply hawked to the highest bidder and is instead destroyed. This has precedent: In 2010, the FTC blocked the use of subscriber personal data in the bankruptcy of a magazine directed to gay men, as the data could be misused. OscarsA new survey found that 37 percent of Americans want the number of awards given out at the Oscars to increase and just 10 percent want it to decrease. Well, good news for them: There’s a new casting Oscar coming, and with the new branch that certainly looks stunt-y, this is outstanding cover for the Academy to finally give us that stunts Oscar. Where precisely the room for new awards in the ceremony will come from is a bit of a mixed bag; 20 percent of Americans interested in the Oscars want the ceremony to be longer, while 21 percent want it to be shorter. Acceptance speech shortening — a bad idea! — was about split, but respondents were twice as likely to say they’d prefer host speeches to be shorter (a good idea!) than prefer longer. On that note, the Numlock Awards newsletter is heating up, be sure to check it out for Oscar forecasts and fun posts about the movies. Planet HollywoodIn the annals of themed restaurants, Planet Hollywood is a stalwart, with the chain launched by Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis in 1991 and each location stuffed with movie memorabilia. The chain went under in the early 2000s, and the contents of those 100-ish prop-stocked restaurants have been languishing in a warehouse in Orlando for the past 20 years. That ends later in March, when 1,600 of the props from Planet Hollywood’s cache go up for auction, including the flag motif top hat and coat Apollo Creed wore in Rocky IV, a bullwhip from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the correct Holy Grail from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the embryo-smuggling Barbasol can from Jurassic Park, the sports almanac from Back to the Future and Leia’s blaster from Return of the Jedi, as well as what one auctioneer called “most of Titanic” from Titanic. The blaster is expected to be the top item, and is expected to sell for around $75,000, followed by the wood panel from Titanic that saved Rose ($40,000). Samantha Davis-Friedman, Attractions Magazine SnakesSnakes evolved from lizards over 100 million years ago, and what followed was a vast and intense period of diversification and evolution. Today, there are roughly 4,000 species of snakes, one of the most diverse predators on the planet. A new study attributes this to a period of adaptation 125 million years ago that fostered all kinds of snakes able to exploit many different gaps in the ecosystem. Snakes were able to evolve three times faster than lizards were, which allowed them to evolve new features, diets and resilience in new habitats way quicker than their cousins. Jack Tamisiea, Scientific American Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today. Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement. Previous Sunday subscriber editions: The Internationalists · Video Game Funding · BYD · Disney Channel Original Movie · Talon Mine · Our Moon · Rock Salt · Wind Techs · Yeezys · Armed Forces · Christmas Music · The Golden Screen · New York Hotels · A City on Mars · Personality Change · Graphics · You Are What You Watch ·Comics Data · Extremely Online · Kevin Perjurer · Kia Theft Spree · Right to Repair · Chicken Sandwich WarsSunday Edition Archives: 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018You're currently a free subscriber to Numlock News. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
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Numlock News: February 23, 2024 • Drunkonyms, Lego, Bluey
Friday, February 23, 2024
By Walt Hickey Have a great weekend! Lego Goodwill has auctioned off a 14-karat Lego piece for $18101, a solid gold version of the Kanohi Hau mask from the line of Bionicle masks. While Lego produced
Numlock News: February 22, 2024 • Monkey, Fighter Jet, Pilots
Thursday, February 22, 2024
By Walt Hickey I was the guest on this week's 99% Invisible episode talking about the book, check it out! Monkeys The reality of modern medical science is that it requires lots and lots of monkeys
Numlock News: February 21, 2024 • Quasar, Sailboat, Genomes
Wednesday, February 21, 2024
By Walt Hickey DVDs The era of buying physical DVDs and Blu-rays is coming to a close, as the business fell in 2023 to a $1.3 billion slice of the US home entertainment spend, down from $9 billion in
Numlock News: February 20, 2024 • William Riker, Bob Marley, Cocoa
Tuesday, February 20, 2024
By Walt Hickey Welcome back! One Love The Bob Marley biopic Bob Marley: One Love made $52 million domestically and won the weekend, which given the $29 million made abroad is a great opening for a
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Monday, February 19, 2024
By Walt Hickey Baldur's Gate Hasbro, which owns Wizards of the Coast and thus the Dungeons & Dragons intellectual property that fuels the Larian Studios game Baldur's Gate 3, has reported
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