By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Hachette is selling my book for $21 once it’s in the cart as part of their cyber week sale. I’ve never seen this thing this cheap. Makes a great gift!

Ringtones

The annual revenue of ringtone sales peaked at $1.6 billion in 2007, adjusted for inflation. That essentially came out of nowhere, and truth be told evaporated within just a few years, a multibillion-dollar blip, when ringtones accounted for more of the music business’s revenue than digital albums or single downloads did. Ringtones are still a business, but they’re definitely not an industry anymore: Revenues are down over 99 percent, hitting $10.5 million. Of the ringtone sales that do exist, it’s actually not entirely clear how much is going to the artists anyway. Who’s buying? Basically, “people who were between the ages of 14 and 20 when ringtones were popular,” as the average age of the users of the four biggest ringtone apps spans from 31 to 37.

Chris Dalla Riva, Sherwood News

Moana, Too

Cinemas were bustling this weekend, with Moana 2 making a Thanksgiving record of $221 million over the five-day holiday weekend and securing the single largest five-day debut in history. Wicked and Gladiator 2 are all humming along as well, making another $117.5 million and $44 million respectively over the five days. In the aggregate, cinemas made $422 million across all films, the best Thanksgiving ever by over $100 million and nearly triple last year’s Thanksgiving haul.

Rebecca Rubin, Variety

Parade

The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade scored 31.3 million viewers, up 10 percent from the tune-in last year, which was the all-time high. The event is one of the rare presentations in television that’s actually gaining viewers, an impressive accomplishment. The live broadcast scored 7.24 million viewers in the 18-to-49 demo. The follow-up program, the National Dog Show, also averaged 12.2 million viewers, itself a high. While the Dallas Cowboys-New York Giants game ended up winning the day with 38.5 million viewers of those terrible teams, the simple fact is that the Macy’s parade had something that the game fundamentally lacked: New Yorkers making consistent forward progress and reliable gains in yardage.

Rick Porter, The Hollywood Reporter

Kitty

The Little Cat (Le petit chat) is a painting made between November and December of 1888 by Paul Gauguin, and it’s also known because it appears in a painting made at the same time by Vincent Van Gogh depicting his friend painting it. Both paintings are now on display at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, after The Little Cat had been hidden in a private collection for more than a century. As part of its exhibition in Amsterdam, the painting underwent conservation work, which found that it’s a fragment cut down from a much larger canvas, explaining its weird dimensions. They also found another previously unnoticed element of the painting: There’s a bug in it! They found a beetle that got stuck in the wet paint in a yellow area underneath the kitten! At first conservators could not identify the beetle, so they called in an entomologist, who concluded after analyzing it that there are 11,000 species of beetle in France and it’s gonna be pretty hard to identify the lil guy.

Martin Bailey, The Art Newspaper

Corals

An international team of scientists is working to find out how exactly cold-water corals reproduce, which is a pretty big enigma in the field. Scientists know nothing about the reproductive behavior of 96 percent of cold-water coral species, including some of the most widespread ones. The corals are under threat, so figuring out how exactly they populate is crucial knowledge if we ever want to be able to repopulate. The corals are really magnificent: The coral mounds grow by millimeters every year, but some are 300 meters in size, serving as important habitats. One coral 365 meters down off the coast of Hawaii is the world’s oldest known continuously living marine organism, and is 4,265 years old.

Christian Elliott, Hakai Magazine

Go For It

One impact of the analytics revolution in football is that teams this year are going for it on fourth down, rejecting the previous conventional wisdom to play conservatively and punt it. Teams are going for it 71 percent of the time when they’re on fourth down with one yard to go, they’re going for it 42 percent of the time when they’re fourth-and-two, and they’re even going for it 30 percent of the time on fourth-and-three. In 2009, they went for it on fourth-and-two just 20 percent of the time, and went for it on fourth-and-three just 10 percent of the time.

Lev Akabas, Sportico

Sonic

Early tracking has dealt a bit of a surprise when it comes to the weekend before Christmas, when Disney will release Mufasa: The Lion King into cinemas against Paramount’s Sonic the Hedgehog 3. The expectation is that anything even vaguely adjacent to The Lion King is gonna crush any comers, but early numbers from National Research Group actually have Sonic winning this, with $55 million projected to Mufasa’s $50 million. Both studios have played off those projections, with each essentially saying that they’re keeping their powder dry and plan to roll out their advertising for the films after Thanksgiving anyway. I do not have access to the numbers here, but I have been on the internet long enough to guess that there might actually be a little bit more action in the Sonic fandom than the Mufasa fandom.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

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