By Walt Hickey
Zach Bryan
Zach Bryan just set the record for the largest ticketed concert in U.S. history, playing to a crowd of 112,408 at Michigan Stadium on Saturday night. The previous record was held by country star George Strait, who played to 110,905 at Kyle Field in Texas in 2024, and the record prior to that was the Grateful Dead playing Raceway Park in New Jersey in 1977 to a crowd of 107,019. That said, these are just ticketed events; the largest concert audience in history was a free Rod Stewart show in 1994 at Copacabana Beach in Brazil, to 3.5 million.
Energy Storage
Battery installations at utilities that serve the U.S. grid jumped in the second quarter of this year, with 5.6 gigawatts of energy storage coming online in April, May and June. This energy storage allows solar energy (that can only be generated during daylight) and wind energy (that can be intermittent) to be useful outside active generation hours, smoothing out the supply curve. The 5.6 gigawatts of storage added in the quarter is 63 percent higher than it was during the same period a year ago, and is enough to power 3.7 million homes during peak demand.
Halloween
A new survey conducted on behalf of the Halloween and Costume Association found that 51 percent of adults who celebrate Halloween will dress up for the day, and 32 percent of adults who celebrate will also dress up their pets. Adults spend an average of $60.30 on those costumes, and as anyone who has been to the 6-foot skeleton overrun suburbs lately can attest, 54 percent decorate their homes or yards.
Idle
A new survey of Americans found that 46.5 percent of respondents are still sharing their streaming passwords with other people despite crackdowns on password sharing from the likes of Netflix and Disney+. Another 41.8 percent of respondents admitted that they also used other people’s logins. However, that is indeed half of the 88.7 percent who admitted to doing so in 2024, a sign that those crackdowns actually worked.
Erik Gruenwedel, Media Play News
Smokes
The tobacco industry in Indonesia is both a major economic engine for the country as well as a somewhat atypical and self-contained industry. Indonesia has one of the largest smoking populations in the world, with 70 million active smokers of whom 7.4 percent are between the ages of 10 and 18. Most of the smokers in Indonesia prefer clove-laced tobacco called kretek, and all that tobacco is locally produced as a result. As of 2024, tobacco alone was responsible for four percent of the nation’s GDP. All that being said, the major tobacco companies in the country — HM Sampoerna and Gudang Garam — have been tumbling lately amid large drops in sales due to a tobacco glut and an economic crisis. The problem is that the cigarette companies of this size are unable to do the standard playbook for this kind of firm — lay people off. Such an act would backfire because the tobacco industry’s 6 million workers are also a key driver of consumer purchasing power in the country.
Blue
A new study published in Antiquity argues that ancient artists may indeed have had access to blue pigments, based on the discovery of smudges of the vivid blue mineral azurite at a site in central Germany where hunter-gatherers posted up 13,000 years ago. The smudge was first feared to be contamination, but after study with x-ray fluorescence and scanning electron microscopy, it was discovered to be the naturally occurring mineral that can be found near the surface in Germany. The flat stone it was found on might actually be a palette.
Death Dealer
A lawsuit lodged by the heirs of legendary artist Frank Frazetta against one of the artist’s publishers has come to an end. The suit began with a straightforward allegation of copyright infringement to somewhat explosive claims of forgery of documents. The matter is related to two paintings (Death Dealer II and Death Dealer V) that appear in Frazetta Book Cover Art: The Definitive Reference, images that Frazetta’s heirs alleged were included without authorization. The judge rejected $300,000 worth of damages proposed by the Frazetta estate, agreeing with the publisher that any infringement was not willful and was done in good faith. However, the judge did awarded statutory damages of $20,000 — $68,784 in fees and $9,170.61 in costs — and also forced the books out of print.
Brigid Alverson, The Comics Journal
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