Numlock News: April 19, 2024 • Antarctica, Counterfeits, Eisbock

Apr 19, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend!

Hipgnosis

Over the past several years plenty of artists have cashed out by selling their catalogs to the Hipgnosis Songs Fund, including Journey, Justin Bieber, Neil Young and Justin Timberlake. The company has been slightly troubled, as an independent advisor’s report found that management had “materially overstated the fund’s revenue,” leading to the board cutting the value of the portfolio by more than a quarter. Amid the difficulties, Hipgnosis has agreed to a $1.402 billion takeover by rival Concord, which itself has racked up a roster of artist catalogs after spending $2.8 billion.

Lars Brandle and Elizabeth Dilts Marshall, Billboard

Counterfeits

A Connecticut man pleaded guilty to a scheme that sold 145 faked paintings that had been passed off as the work of pop artist Peter Max to 43 different buyers. The paintings were in fact prints, to which the counterfeiter added brushstrokes and signatures in an attempt to pass them off as the real deal. He’s also been ordered to restitute the $248,600 he made in the course of passing off the faked paintings for amounts ranging from $1,325 to $2,833. The counterfeiter has also been sentenced to a 14-month term in prison.

Benjamin Sutton, The Art Newspaper

Soft Drink

A proposed class-action suit has been filed in Texas against movie theater chain Cinemark, lodging the explosive allegation that Cinemark’s 24-ounce cups are, upon inspection, only capable of holding 22 ounces of liquid. While the movie industry has struggled, Cinemark did post their highest level of concession sales of all time last year, as concessions are where theaters are able to get the highest margin, as seen by the $8.80 price paid by the plaintiff for the supposedly 24 ounces of liquid. The allegations in the suit go so far as to argue that it’s actually cheaper to get the 20-ounce soda on a per-ounce basis given the purported number of ounces in the so-called 24-ounce cup.

Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter

Ro/Ro

The Port of Baltimore — which has been mostly closed owing to the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in late March and subsequent blockage of the harbor — is most significant because it’s crucial for roll-on/roll-off cargo, essentially cars being shipped across the Atlantic. Prior to the collapse, it was the busiest Ro/Ro port in the country. With only a few days impacted, the Port of Brunswick in Georgia, the second-busiest Ro/Ro port, saw 77,236 units of Ro/Ro cargo pass through in March, up 21 percent year over year, a significant uptick for a port that averages 69,882 units per month.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

Ice Cores

Earlier this year a team of scientists successfully completed an audacious mission designed to extract ice cores from a remote and difficult-to-access site on the Canisteo Peninsula in Antarctica, with a U.S.-South Korea team attempting to extract an ice core that could illuminate what has historically been a mystery for researchers when it comes to glacial movement. It required a helicopter making 18 trips delivering gear to the worksite with a rapidly ticking 10-day clock to collect the ice cores amid a looming blizzard. The objective was 150 meters of ice core, and despite drilling issues such as fractured ice at 80 meters, a jammed drill, and generators that could be repaired only by watching YouTube videos beamed in by Starlink, on the last day they pulled off 150 meters of core drilled out, packaged neatly in over 100 ice core boxes.

Christian Elliott, Science

Eisbock

An eisbock is a beer that takes a doppelbock and essentially freezes it, removes the frozen water, and results in a freeze-distilled beverage that’s stronger than most. Freeze-distilled beer does exist in the U.S. — Icehouse, Bud Ice, Natty Ice — but those are light lagers that get iced to an alcohol content of 5.5 percent to 6 percent. Eisbocks go much further, with the German brews taking that up to 6.5 percent to 9 percent ABV. That, however, is essentially illegal in the United States, as any brewery that wants to freeze-distill also has to possess a distilling license, which is rare and legally cumbersome.

Brett Cortelletti, Vinepair

Churchill

In a famous 1954 incident, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill rejected a commissioned portrait painted by the artist Graham Sutherland because he thought he looked like crap in it, notwithstanding the, er, verisimilitude of the portrayal. The painting was destroyed by Churchill’s secretary two years later. While the work was destroyed, a number of studies produced by the artist in preparation for the piece survived, and one of those paintings, Study of Winston Churchill, will be offered for auction this June at Sotheby’s, where it’s expected to sell for £500,000 to £800,000, making it a perfect purchase for someone with an incredibly complicated relationship to Winston Churchill.

Abby Schultz, Barron’s

This week in the Sunday edition I spoke to Neil Paine, who wrote “A history of the American economy through stadium names” for Sherwood News. We spoke about how stadium naming customs have changed over the years, the differences across leagues, and how that commercialization has been reflected in media. Paine can be found at Neil’s Substack and at the NASCAR podcast Podracing.

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