Numlock News: February 20, 2024 • William Riker, Bob Marley, Cocoa

Feb 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 movie that cost $70 million to make. That beat out Madame Web, a troubled adaptation of a D-list Marvel character that bombed, making $26.2 million on a budget that is either $115 million (according to outside sources) or $80 million (which the studio said it cost after factoring in tax incentives). This, followed by the previous bomb that was Morbius, also based on a D-list Marvel character, demonstrates that perhaps it’s best not to dip too deep into the catalog unless you’ve got a really specific idea of a new take on a superhero.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

The Future Is Here

A Civil Resolution Tribunal in Canada has ruled that Air Canada is indeed on the hook for a discount offered to a customer that its chatbot made up completely. A passenger inquiring about Air Canada’s bereavement rates was informed by the chatbot to book a flight immediately and ask for a refund within 90 days, which is not Air Canada’s policy at all. The tribunal ruled that the man was entitled to a refund of 650.88 Canadian dollars off the original CA$1,640.36 fare, and that Air Canada would have to cover interest as well as the man’s fees.

Ashley Belanger, Ars Technica

Cassettes

Last year, 436,400 cassette albums were sold in the United States, steady with the 439,700 sold the year before. That’s good for 0.41 percent of the American market for albums sold across all formats, and two acts command a disproportionate share of the cassette market. One is obviously Taylor Swift, who could sell her music on a wax cylinder and still find a way to take it platinum: She was responsible for 74,500 of those cassette sales. The other act is the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack compilations, which remain top-sellers a decade after the first film actually came out. Guardians of the Galaxy: Awesome Mix Vol. 1 was the top-selling cassette last year, with 18,000 sales; Vol. 2 moved 16,000 units and Vol. 3 moved 13,000 units, and including the TV soundtrack, the Guardians sold a total of 52,500 cassettes last year. All told, all four of the Guardians mixtapes have sold 295,000 copies on cassette as of February 15, 2024. Take note: The market obviously craves a mixtape resurgence.

Keith Caulfield, Billboard

Tailwinds

Winds were fast over the mid-Atlantic last week, with the jet stream reaching record speeds of 265 miles per hour over Washington, D.C. That’s the second-highest measurement on record since the ‘50s when recordkeeping began, bested only by a 267-miles-per-hour wind speed in 2002. This meant that a number of commercial flights approached record speeds, with American Airlines Flight 120 from Philadelphia to Doha, Qatar, hitting ground speeds of 840 miles per hour, which is among the highest ever recorded. The planes were flying at their normal cruising speeds, but the air they were cruising in was at unusually fast speeds.

Jason Samenow, The Washington Post

Riker Maneuver

A group of citizens from Valdez, Alaska, is fundraising to install a life-sized bronze statue of a local hometown hero, with the nonprofit Riker Maneuver estimating it will cost $125,000 in total to build a statue dedicated to William T. Riker, a Starfleet officer who will be born in Valdez on August 19, 2335. Riker, the first officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise, played by Jonathan Frakes on Star Trek: The Next Generation, hails from Valdez according to the intricate canon of the iconic franchise. While most statues commemorate a person who was born somewhere, statues commemorating a Starfleet officer who will be born somewhere are not new, including a Captain James T. Kirk statue in Riverside, Iowa, and a Captain Kathryn Janeway statue in Bloomington, Indiana.

Wesley Early, Alaska Public Media - Anchorage

Cocoa

Prices for cocoa are at a 46-year high, up 65 percent year over year, and expected to stay there at least through later this year, when West Africa’s cocoa growing season begins. In the short term — Easter and such — that’s not likely to manifest in prices, as the chocolate eggs and bunnies have already been manufactured and are in warehouses and stores already. It will be an issue over the course of the year when it comes to chocolate yet to be produced, and it might be easier to get a 14-foot Home Depot skeleton than cheap chocolate this coming Halloween.

Chris Casey, FoodDive

San Junipero

A new study out of Stanford brought virtual reality equipment to 17 senior living communities and strapped VR headsets on 245 participants aged 65 to 103, and found that 80 percent of them had a more positive attitude after being injected directly into an immersive, all-encompassing multimedia environment. The researchers allowed the seniors the opportunity to choose from a seven-minute experience where they — and these are real — got to parachute out of a plane, ride in a tank, visit Paris or North Africa, and presumably do other experiences that were really only possible for them to do in a single day when they were young and between the years 1942 and 1945. They could also pretend to pet a cat.

Terry Spencer, The Associated Press

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