By Walt Hickey

Welcome back!

Crow

Mediocre week at the box office, with all the new releases still coming up behind Deadpool & Wolverine, which came back to first place with $18.3 million domestic in its fifth weekend, bringing it up to $1.221 billion globally. Blink Twice, which is Zoë Kravitz’ directorial debut, opened to $7.3 million, good for fourth place, and the remake of The Crow starring the gauntest Skarsgard opened in eighth place with $4.6 million, somehow behind a re-release of Coraline. The only movie that seemed to do pretty well given expectations is The Forge, which popped with great reviews and $6 million, and will be filling this summer’s slot for Ambiguously Named Movie You Increasingly Realize Is An Independently-Produced Christian Movie Over The Course Of Reading The Synopsis, Which Starts Fairly Typically But Mentions Prayer A Lot More Than You Would Usually Expect.

Pamela McClintock, The Hollywood Reporter

Jersey

The jersey worn by Babe Ruth in the game of the 1932 World Series where he was said to have called his shot sold for $24.12 million at auction on Saturday, making it the single most expensive sports collectible ever. It’s a size 46 Yankees road jersey worn by the player in Game 3 of that series. The previous record for most expensive memorabilia was a Mickey Mantle card that sold for $12.6 million. The same jersey was sold for $940,000 in 2005, but that was before it was conclusively linked to the specific “called shot” game.

Eric Jackson, Sportico

Starliner

NASA decided Saturday that the two astronauts who rode the Boeing Starliner spacecraft to the International Space Station will, in light of safety concerns, not ride it back. It will return empty, and a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft will bring the astronauts home in several months. It’s a bruising moment for Boeing and a crowning achievement and legacy-defining moment for all the money guys who crowded out engineering in the management of a crucial American aerospace company. The company is now at a turning point, as the $4.2 billion NASA contract was to develop the Starliner spacecraft and fly a minimum of two and potentially up to six crew flights for the ISS, and it now seems like it might not actually be able to fulfill that contract between now and when the ISS is scheduled to retire in 2030. NASA has committed $5.1 billion to Boeing for the Starliner.

Stephen Clark, Ars Technica

Suspended

On June 26, Danny Jansen was playing for the Toronto Blue Jays in a game against the Boston Red Sox, a game which was suspended in the second inning when he was at bat. The game was scheduled to resume two months later and will be played Tuesday, picking up right where it left off. In the interim, on July 27, the Toronto Blue Jays traded him away to none other than the Boston Red Sox. Sensing the opportunity, the manager of the Red Sox has said, “He’s catching; let’s make history,” as Danny Jansen will become the first person in the history of baseball to play for each of the two teams during a single game.

Lindsey Adler, The Wall Street Journal

Vinyl

The price of a vinyl record rose 25.5 percent from 2017 to 2023, from $24.90 to $31.25, outpacing inflation overall. The price for vinyl is heavily dependent on manufacturing costs compared to other music distribution formats — for instance, CDs only grew about 20 percent more expensive over that period — and a couple of music trends are fueling the rise. Albums are getting longer, with the average number of tracks on albums in the Billboard top 10 climbing from 13.2 in 2014 to 19.1 in 2022, and that means more records when those albums are shipped in vinyl as double or even triple LPs.

Glenn Peoples, Billboard

Podcast Ads

In the second quarter of this year, podcast ads took up an average 10.9 percent of the run time of podcasts, a significant pop from the 7.9 percent of run time in 2021. Podcasters are bringing in 6 cents in ad revenue for every listener-hour, or an hour of programming heard by one listener, which is up from 2 cents in 2015 and 5 cents in 2021. Indeed, it makes one nostalgic for the days when direct-to-consumer companies coked up on venture capital were blasting out ads for DTC mattresses, food prep companies that don’t actually serve your neighborhood, and Products For Gentlemen Who Have Found Aging To Be Discouraging. Now it’s all a bunch of blue chips hawking actual store-brand products. What the heck!

Katie Deighton, The Wall Street Journal

Ibis

The northern bald ibis went nearly extinct in Europe by the 17th century, and has been revived by breeding and rewilding efforts that take birds born in captivity into the wild. The problem is, there’s no collective memory of how to migrate or what their migration route actually is, because the population in Central Europe rose from pretty much zero in 2002 to almost 300 today. To that end, the conservationist group the Waldrappteam has endeavored to teach the birds their migration routes. Human foster parents imprint on chicks at a young age, and then later on those same humans use a microlight aircraft to teach the birds their ancestors’ migration routes. The first bird independently migrated back from Tuscany to Bavaria in 2011, and the hope is to have over 350 birds migrating the 2,800-kilometer route on their own by 2028.

Bobby Hardy and Stefanie Dazio, The Associated Press

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 ·

Comics Data · Extremely Online · Kevin Perjurer · Kia Theft Spree · Right to Repair · Chicken Sandwich Wars

Sunday Edition Archives: 2022 · 2021 · 2020 · 2019 · 2018