Numlock News: May 6, 2024 • Elk, The Phantom Menace, What A Pro Wants

May 06, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Brown Gold

Every winter, elk, deer and moose shed their antlers, and foragers eager for the discarded but pronounced objects engage in a mad dash at the start of the first day of antler collection season in order to get prime specimens. Used as decor, souvenirs, and in some cases dog chews, the remains of the 7,500 elk that winter in the 24,700-acre National Elk Refuge outside of Jackson, Wyoming, are a prized find, in so much demand that this year, for the first time, organizers made the first week open exclusively to Wyoming residents. People will pay $15 to $16 per pound for brown elk antlers — that is, the kind of antlers that are yet to be bleached by the sun. An elk antler might weigh 8 to 13 pounds.

Angela Owens, The Wall Street Journal

Fall Guy

The Fall Guy opened to lower than anticipated box office, as the stuntman action comedy made $28.5 million domestically, shy of the $30 million to $35 million anticipated and well below the $118.4 million that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 made last year in the same weekend. The movie’s got great word of mouth and a solid rating on CinemaScore, so Universal isn’t quite panicking yet. In second place was the re-release of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, which made $8.1 million, a bold opportunity to let down a whole new generation of fans.

Aaron Couch, The Hollywood Reporter

What A Pro Wants

Fans of the NBA and NHL, each of which is well into its postseason, have united behind a common enemy: namely, an AT&T ad that is grating nerves and provoking tens of thousands of negative reactions on social media. The advertisement adapts the Christina Aguilera song “What A Girl Wants” and changes it to “What A Pro Wants,” and it’s completely inescapable. First emerging during March Madness, it’s aired on national television at least 473 times in the past week, 106 of which were during ad breaks across national broadcasts of NBA games and 212 times during NHL playoffs coverage. It’s got an estimated 729 billion impressions, not bad for the $23 million AT&T has plowed into the campaign. A ubiquitous ad campaign is a double-edged sword; people who watch an ad spot six times have been found to recall an advertiser 92 percent of the time, but those same people are 48 percent more likely to find the spot annoying.

Anthony Crupi, Sportico

Poets

Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department moved 439,000 album-equivalent units in its second week of release, an 89 percent drop from week one but nevertheless the best second-week numbers for a record since 25 by Adele, which moved 1.162 million units. Of those units, 107,000 were album sales, with the remaining balance derived from the 428.54 billion streams the album racked up in its second week of release. Proving that the music industry and the charts that define it are extremely healthy, thank you very much, the runner-up was Morgan Wallen’s March 2023 album, One Thing at a Time.

Chris Willman, Variety

Decline By 9

A tricky problem facing educators and parents is the long-feared but little-understood “decline by 9,” which is the phenomenon seen among American kids where the percentage who report reading for fun drops precipitously around the age of 9. According to Scholastic’s research, 57 percent of kids aged 8 say that they read books for fun on most days. Among those at age 9, that number drops to 35 percent, a fairly calamitous decline that is worrisome not only for the people who want to sell kids books. Middle-grade books are an issue, and there hasn’t been a bona fide hit in the arena since Dog Man hit in 2016.

Dan Kois, Slate

E-Waste

The rate at which we are generating electronic waste is increasing five times as quickly as the means by which we have to process it. There were 37 million tons of e-waste generated in 2010 and 68 million tons generated in 2022, but the capacity to recycle increased from 9 tons to only 14 tons over the same period. Electronic waste is a missed opportunity in many ways, as in 2022 discarded boards contained an estimated $91 billion in metals. If recycling rates were to rise, the value of the materials would begin to overcome the cost of recycling them, with the magic number being 38 percent of electronics recycled to break even. At 60 percent, the economic benefit would be $38 billion a year.

Mary Hoff, Ensia

Side-Loaders

In 2022, Waste Management sought to replace 2,000 of its 18,000 collection trucks in service hauling garbage to side-loading trucks rather than rear-loading trucks. So far it’s well on its way, having replaced 800 of the trucks, with a target date of 2025 to finish the job. The side-loaders are much more efficient, and require only one employee, rather than the traditional rear-loaders where there’s a driver and a worker who hops on and off the truck to haul trash into the vehicle’s maw. They’re also much safer, as the dangerous part of the operation is the one where someone has to jump out of a truck onto the street to pick up trash.

Kristin Broughton, The Wall Street Journal

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