By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Comedian

Well, it’s finally happening: they’re selling Comedian. You may recall that in 2019, the artist Maurizio Cattelan unveiled a new sculpture called Comedian, which is a banana duct-taped to a wall. It was generally understood to be a commentary on the absurdism of the contemporary art market, essentially a banana-shaped get a load of this crap. Well, one of the three editions of Comedian will be auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York, and it’s estimated to sell for $1 million to $1.5 million. What the person will be buying is a certificate of authenticity, the instructions for how to display the sculpture, and a single banana and one roll of duct tape to get you started out. Prior to auction, the work will be displayed in New York, London, Paris, Milan, Hong Kong, Dubai, Taipei, Tokyo and Los Angeles, which sounds like a pretty exhausting itinerary until you remember any town with a grocery store and a Home Depot can convincingly execute the sculpture.

Carlie Porterfield, The Art Newspaper

Floppies

San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency is going to spend $212 million get the Muni Metro light rail off floppy disks for good. The train control system has had just 5.25-inch floppy disks since 1998, and initially began to plan to ditch the floppies starting in 2018, with an intended floppy-free date in 2028. The pandemic derailed that, but now SFMTA will deal with Hitachi Rai to build out their new train control system and support the new system for 20 to 25 years. When completed, the overhaul will drag the SFMTA five generations of control systems forward.

Scharon Harding, Ars Technica

Rodeo

TKO Group, which owns the WWE wrestling promotion and the UFC fighting promotion, is also adding Professional Bull Riders to its portfolio of arena stunt shows. It’s a transaction with its parent company, Endeavor Group Holdings, and involves a $3.25 billion deal involving mostly stock maneuvers. In addition to PBR, they’re also getting On Location, a white-glove events and experiences company, as well as IMG Media, which does media rights and marketing. Soon TKO will achieve its true goal: rolling up all the possible events where a contractor exposes themselves to potentially grievous injury for the entertainment of large crowds.

Brendan Coffey, Sportico

Merch

During the pandemic when shows couldn’t go on, merchandise became a bigger slice of the pie for musical artists. The global market for music merch hit $13.4 billion last year, which does include vinyl and CD business, because given their physical existence they in many ways behave not dissimilarly to a tour T-shirt from the perspective of the record company. Given that half my closet is Mountain Goats T-shirts, yeah, I concede there’s a market for this stuff. Physical music is actually expected to peak in 2025 and then begin to decline, but apparel and digital merch are expected to more than make up the difference. Thing is, the margins on music are simply way better than on clothes: The profit margin is 25.4 percent for recorded music at Universal Music Group, but just 5.3 percent for its merch.

Glenn Peoples, Billboard

Tigers

From 2020 to 2022, 52 camera traps were running throughout the crucial tiger habitat of Ulu Masen on Sumatra in Indonesia. They accumulated 6,732 nights of recording in the aggregate, but the bad news is that over the course of all those nights, they only saw 11 individual Sumatran tigers only 39 times, none of which were cubs. This is worrisome and suggests that severe levels of poaching are going on behind the scenes, particularly because among the 11 tigers, there were no breeding females and evidence of a lot of population turnover.

Nature

Tesla

The company Tesla is best known as a car company, but their latest earnings report shows that the most interesting stuff isn’t cars. Automotive sales were pretty much flat, up just 1.3 percent year over year, and with a 16 percent profit margin. Meanwhile, the energy generation and storage business — which sells the Powerwall batteries for home use and larger Megapack storage facilities used by utilities and municipalities — is doing brisk business, growing 52.4 percent year over year with an impressive 31 percent profit margin.

Claire Yubin Oh and David Crowther, Sherwood News

Hasbro

Hasbro is a company best known for stuff like My Little Pony or NERF, but the real action is in Magic: The Gathering and, to a lesser extent, Dungeons & Dragons. Both are under its Wizards of the Coast division, which has been responsible for most of the momentum in the company. Despite Wizards of the Coast down 5 percent — Baldur’s Gate 3 came out last year, so this was always going to be a downer — the company did manage to squeak out a small profit thanks to Play-Doh having its best back-to-school season ever and stuff like the Monopoly Go! game from Scopely delivering $10 million to Hasbro per month.

James Zahn, The Toybook

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: MCU · Fanfiction · User Magazine · Reentry · Panda Dunks · Net Zero · Spiraled · On The Edge · Luggage · The Editors · Can’t Get Much Higher · Solitaire ·

Posting Nexus · Memorabilia · Drainage Tile · Desert Surfing · Music · Congestion Pricing · Underwater Sound · Hunts Point · Queer Olympics · Energy Drinks · Baseball Movies · Trillion Trees · Risk Aversion · Packaging · Ice Cores · Stadium Names · Uncertain · Green Homes · Political Future · UFOs ·

Antarctica Comms · Rot Economy · The Internationalists · Video Game Funding · BYD · Disney Channel Original Movie · Talon Mine · Our Moon · Rock Salt · Wind Techs

Sunday Edition Archives: 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018