By Walt Hickey
Records
Even as streaming has thoroughly replaced CDs and the vinyl resurgence remains just a small and idiosyncratic bit of the overall record business, one aesthetic staple has endured through the decades: the congratulatory wall plaque featuring metallic records to indicate an admirable volume of sales. Though it’s a necessarily niche industry, the main purveyor of the music industry flex is Jewel Box Platinum, which still produces 8,000 to 10,000 pieces per year. Standard packages for Gold and Platinum album sales, as well as high Billboard chart placement, generally run $400 to $600 a pop.
Carly Thomas, The Hollywood Reporter
Euro
The European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts is the largest weather forecaster on the continent and collects unfathomable amounts of meteorological data in its quest to model the weather. It also sells that data to private companies that use it for in-house forecasting needs. Customers include energy traders, shipping lines and insurers. Interest in those commercial licenses has spiked as AI weather forecasting is seen as an increasingly viable and possibly profitable venture. The number of firms buying commercial licenses has increased to over 800, paying an average of 36,000 euros (US$42,200) per year for the data.
Drive Thru
The annual QSR assessment of drive-thrus is in, with Taco Bell emerging victorious as the least time spent in the drive-thru at an average of 256.8 seconds. Other speedy drive-thrus included KFC (261.2 seconds), Tim Hortons (265.9 seconds) and Arby’s (272.3 seconds). At the other end of the spectrum, perennial long-wait Chick-fil-A came out as the longest wait of 426.9 seconds, in no small part due to robust demand for the chicken. Coming in right behind them was fellow Chicken Sandwich Wars great power Popeye’s, which registered at 410 seconds.
Censored
The latest report from PEN America found that from July 1, 2021, to June 30, 2025, there were 22,180 books banned across 451 public school districts and 45 states. The 2024-25 school year affected 3,752 unique titles across 87 school districts nationally. Most of those school districts have at least some advocates pushing back on the creeping bans, as there was a public response against censorship in 70 districts.
Nathalie op de Beeck, Publishers Weekly
Broadway
Broadway musicals are not doing great, based on reports that of the 18 musicals that opened last year, none have yet actually turned a profit. The absence of any original musicals has been a nagging concern, with most of the newcomers taking the form of a movie (usually by Robert Zemeckis), gut remodeled into a Broadway musical of some kind or the form of a jukebox musical that just jams the greatest hits record of a popular artist into a flimsy plot in an attempt to get some of that Mamma Mia! money. A key reason for this is the economic reality of it being hard to convince someone to spend eight hundred dollars to see a musical they know absolutely nothing about, hence the desire for adaptations and jukeboxes. But it does stymie the long tail that has defined Broadway’s most successful productions. In the last 30 years, only 18 percent of new musicals were not adaptations of some kind.
Dogs
There are about one billion dogs on Earth, but about 80 percent of them are not pets restricted to a household. While some are certainly strays — that is, dogs that were once pets — or feral, the better term for most of them, according to scientists, is free-ranging dogs. They are animals that rely on a mixture of scavenging, hunting and begging to stay alive, dwelling in places like the Indian subcontinent and Africa. Some of them even have distinct genetic lineages that trace back thousands of years.
AOL
AOL’s dial-up service came to an end on September 30, ultimately defeated by broadband and wireless offerings. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, an estimated 163,401 American households were on dial-up and dial-up alone as of 2023, which came down to 0.13 percent of all homes with internet subscriptions. The decline of dial-up even within AOL has been pronounced. In 2015, 2.1 million dial-up users were still using AOL when it was acquired by Verizon. That number declined to “the low thousands” by the time Verizon sold in 2021.
Wyatte Grantham-Philips, The Associated Press
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1) I'm old enough to remember logging on to AOL the very first time and hearing the familiar "You've got mail". Have to be honest; I'm a bit nostalgic for those days.
2) I guess that if people want a speedy mail at Chick-Fil-A, they're out of cluck. Maybe they should just wing it and try another place.
Thank you; I'll show myself out now.
The death of dial-up is a beautiful example of what happens when governments stops restraining progress.
Pretty much everywhere in the lower-48, you can get cell data that’s usable.
This happened despite Ajit Pai gutting blessed Net Neutrality.