Numlock News: September 18, 2024 • Harlem Globetrotters, MoviePass, Roman Empire

Sep 18, 2024

Charged

Is it a crime, I ask you, to love art? To love the cinema? To feel something, in a place where things are meant to be felt? To want to bring others to this, this temple of art, one of the few places designated so sacred as to engage in one of the few things that make us manifestly human, to create and show off that which we create, so that we ourselves can share in being known? Is it a crime to want that for people? A crime to want to, say, bring a whole bunch of people who have not paid to see a movie into a room, maybe convincing a few investors here and there that there was an actual business to be had in it? For art? Yes. Yes it is. The former CEO of MoviePass has accordingly pleaded guilty to securities fraud conspiracy after taking a plea deal, a deal which sets the losses of the doomed MoviePass venture at $25 million for sentencing purposes rather than the actual government estimate of $300 million in losses, and now faces up to five years in prison and fines up to $250,000.

Winston Cho, The Hollywood Reporter

Ferry

The Federal Transit Administration has announced $300 million in grants to modernize ferry systems in the United States, supporting 18 projects across 14 states, eight of which particularly focus on environmentally friendly propulsion system upgrades. This includes $11.5 million to the ferry system in San Francisco connecting Treasure Island and Mission Bay, Maine’s system is getting improvements in Lincolnville and Islesboro, and in a big injection of funds, a $106.4 million grant for the Alaskan system will replace a 60-year-old vessel currently operating in the southwest of the state, a crucial connector.

Mike Schuler, gCaptain

College Football

A fact of life in college football is that there are a couple of very good, very rich teams, and whole lot of okay teams that don’t make anywhere near as much as the big guys do. As a gesture of good will, the big teams will pay the small teams for the right to absolutely kick the crap out of them, often on national television, leaving a football-team-shaped smear on the turf but, you know, also leaving them a few million dollars richer. The big team, in response, gets a win at home. This season, there are at least 60 such “guarantee games,” with total payouts reaching $75 million.

Ralph D. Russo, The Associated Press

Nobel

The average time it takes between when a future Nobel Prize-winning scientific work is published and when the award is actually granted is now about 20 years across all categories. The Nobels have always played a bit of catchup since their introduction, at first recognizing work over the preceding decades when introduced in the early 1900s. That said, there were still some fairly quick turnarounds: Marie Curie’s win in 1911 was for producing radium in 1910, so pretty immediate recognition. As time has gone on, the insta-win has become downright rare. That’s in part because it often takes decades to identify which science is actually truly groundbreaking. Sometimes the recognition is creative: The 1986 prize in physics recognized both the 1931 development of the electron microscope as well as the 1981 discovery of the scanning tunneling microscope.

Sarah Lewin Frasier and Jen Christiansen, Scientific American

Rome

A new survey found that 9 percent of adult Americans reported thinking about the Roman Empire on at least a weekly basis, with just 1 percent of respondents claiming to think about it daily. In general, the Roman Empire enjoys a somewhat stellar reputation, with 49 percent of respondents saying it had a positive impact on the world and just 15 percent saying a negative one. Among ancient civilizations, only Athens (54 percent favorable, 10 percent unfavorable, with net favorability at 44 percentage points) comes in as worthier in the eyes of the American people, with 49 percent viewing Imperial Rome favorably (net favorability 30 percentage points). Now, this is where people get it wrong, because appraisals of the nightmarish, fascist slave state Sparta is nevertheless viewed favorably by 41 percent of respondents. Meanwhile, the Carthaginians are viewed positively by 28 percent of respondents while 15 percent view them unfavorably — blatant Scipio propaganda. In another blow, the Byzantine Empire suffers from terrible branding, with just 31 percent viewing it favorably; my forthcoming partisan push poll asking respondents about The Roman Empire That Actually Managed To Continue Existing After The Italians Dropped The Ball will fare better.

David Montgomery, YouGov

te reo Māori

In the 1970s, efforts in New Zealand to revive the Māori language really kicked off. As of the 2018 Census, 4 percent of New Zealanders said they were fluent, which was only a slight increase from 3.7 percent in 2013. Based on the General Society Survey, the numbers are a bit better lately: in 2021, 7.9 percent said they can speak te reo Māori fairly well, up from 6.1 percent in 2018, and in 2019 the government set a national target of 1 million speakers by 2040. A new study modeling language proficiency over time puts stock in the future of the tongue, and found that with the 93 percent increase in tertiary te reo course enrollment over the past 10 years, 1 million speakers in 2040 is attainable.

Michael Miller, The Conversation

Globetrotters

The Harlem Globetrotters, the traveling basketball novelty act, will celebrate their 100th anniversary in 2026. Ahead of that, the group — which makes about 250 tour stops in North America per year, with another 150 stops around the rest of the world — is making a push into television, including an animated series and the show Harlem Globetrotters: Play it Forward, which is entering its third season on NBC, Telemundo, and a bunch of digital streaming sites. It’s averaging 900,000 viewers during the Saturday morning block, and the Globetrotters apparently have something like 20 to 40 projects in some state of development at this point. Whether or not those numbers constitute a win is relative, but you should see that Washington Generals television show run against the Globetrotters programming on rival networks; that show sucks and gets absolutely thrashed by them in the ratings every week, and with such spectacular displays of skill!

Alex Weprin, The Hollywood Reporter

Thanks to the paid subscribers to Numlock News who make this possible. Subscribers guarantee this stays ad-free, and get a special Sunday edition. Consider becoming a full subscriber today.

Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Send corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news.

Check out the Numlock Book Club and Numlock award season supplement.

Previous Sunday subscriber editions: The Internationalists · Video Game Funding · BYD · Disney Channel Original Movie · Talon Mine · Our Moon · Rock Salt · Wind Techs ·

Yeezys · Armed Forces · Christmas Music · The Golden Screen · New York Hotels · A City on Mars · Personality Change · Graphics · You Are What You Watch ·

Numlock News

Numlock News: September 18, 2024 • Harlem Globetrotters, MoviePass, Roman Empire

By Walt Hickey