Numlock News: November 27, 2023 • Messi, Anime, Napoleon
By Walt Hickey
Welcome back!
Napoleon
In a daring and unexpected victory, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon has defeated Disney’s Wish in box office battle. At first, this seemed to be a foregone fiasco for Napoleon, with Wish projected to make $45 million to $50 million over the course of the long holiday weekend compared to an anticipated $22 million for Napoleon. But the Mouse failed to anticipate the daring maneuvers of the French general’s biopic — Wellington himself once claimed that Joaquin Phoenix’s mere presence on the battlefield was equal to 40,000 cinemagoers wearing Super Yaki tees — and after a feint where it appeared that Murat’s cavalry had abandoned the Pratzen Heights Regal Cinemas, the surprise arrival of Marshall Davout’s III Corps to the Alamo Drafthouse after a forced march meant that the film made $32.5 million domestically over the long weekend with a global total of $78.8 million, beating out the combined forces of Bob Iger and Prince Pyotr Bagration that saw Wish make just $31.7 million. In classic form, Napoleon lost the overall war owing to the naval victories of The Ballad and Songbirds and Snakes, which made $42 million over the long weekend and remained unchallenged at sea.
Nobility
In the United Kingdom, when a person dies who has no will and no next of kin, most of the time their assets go to the state and are claimed by the Treasury. However, the United Kingdom is also a deeply unserious place. In certain areas, within it, they pretend that the title “Duke” actually matters besides declaring that the title-holder is the result of a certain socially acceptable amount of inbreeding. These places are called Cornwall and Lancaster, and are technically “duchies,” and what that means is after someone dies with no will and no heir, instead of going to the common good, their assets go to a family of wealthy landlords called “The Windsors.” Their assets go toward renovating and upgrading properties owned by two guys called Charlie and Bill Windsor, and the so-called duchies have collected as much as £1.2 million from the estates that lack wills, with the average size of a bona vacantia inheritance that goes to the aristocrats hitting £12,000.
Maeve McClenaghan, Henry Dyer and Rob Evans, The Guardian
Dishwashing
One side effect of dishwashers that are more energy efficient is that they take a great deal longer to run through their wash cycle. The average standard cycle of a dishwasher has increased substantially over the past several decades, as the machines have become both more thorough as well as more efficient with water and energy consumption. The average length of a dishwasher wash cycle rose from 69.4 minutes in 1983 up to 115 minutes in 2003. Since then, it’s risen steadily, and stands at 160.3 minutes as of this year. Part of that is that many dishwashers now leave in a built-in amount of time for dishes to air-dry.
Austen Hufford, The Wall Street Journal
Who Could Have Possibly Seen This Coming?
Squid Game was a massively popular Korean drama that made a huge splash in the United States when distributed on Netflix. The series told the story of 456 desperate people who saw a deadly game show wagered on by the rich as their best way out of financial devastation, a series that served as a daring condemnation of the wealthy and the very concept of class mobility within our economic system. Anyway, Netflix ignored that, and decided to turn Squid Game into an actual game show called Squid Game: The Challenge, that filmed at a former air base in Bedford, Britain. Now, two contestants are threatening legal action through a personal injury law firm alleging they suffered from hypothermia and nerve damage while shooting the game show.
Alleged Whales
There are 24 known species of beaked whale around the world. They’re hard to track and hard to observe, often diving for an hour to depths of 3,000 meters, surfacing for air only briefly for mere minutes. To tell them apart, scientists rely on teeth, and often sound. There have been 20 years’ worth of recordings of a proposed but as-yet unobserved species of beaked whale, the potential Cross Seamount beaked whale, first thought to have been heard in 2005 but as yet actually unseen. Based on nearly 24,000 recorded pulses, 92 percent of them were at night, and 6 percent at sunrise or sunset, which would make these nocturnal foragers particularly elusive.
Andrew Chapman, Hakai Magazine
Fathoms
Fathom Events is a very unique film distributor. They tend to distribute eclectic things, including live opera, Christian cinema, redistributions of old movies, imports and replays of anime movies, and filmed concerts. They’re the guys whose trailers air well before the trailers for actual movies, in the part of the cinema-going experience where Maria Menounos has the floor. In a year where strikes have beguiled Hollywood and the box office is still down 81 percent compared to 2019, Fathom is downright thriving: Fathom is currently projected to end the year with box office up 116 percent compared to 2019.
Erich Schwartzel, The Wall Street Journal
Messi
The auction house Sotheby’s will be selling a set of six shirts worn by a victorious Lionel Messi at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar that saw the Argentinian bring home the top prize. The set of uniforms, one of which was worn in the final, may very well become the most valuable collection of sports memorabilia ever sold at auction. As it stands, the jersey worn by Michael Jordan in the 1998 NBA Finals holds the record, with a sale price of $10.1 million at Sotheby’s in New York in 2022. In the sport of soccer, the top-selling piece of memorabilia is a jersey worn by Diego Maradona in the “Hand of God” game, which sold for $9.3 million. Messi’s jerseys are expected to sell for well more than $10 million.
You Are What You Watch is going to be part of the big holiday promotional push from the publisher. If you want to buy it as a gift, it’s 25 percent off right now and shipping is free with the code CYBER23 on the Hachette website. This promotion is going to end pretty soon!
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The dishwasher time is largely to meet energy regulations; it’ll get worse soon. (So you’ll have to wait longer to find out that, yes, honey, you do have to really make sure there’s nothing stuck to it before you put it in....no, it’s not because I don’t know how to load the washer....)
The whole Messi auction story is just the latest example of how there are people out there with more money than they will ever need.