Thousands of Toddlers Ingesting Marijuana, Ticket Scalpers Defeated? Bookstores are Back, HBO's Massive New "Game of Thrones" Sized Hit (The Five for 01/22/23)
Hey, welcome to The Five.
A couple of quick notes before we begin.
A. Product reviews aren’t a core feature of The Five (this will never become a “review publication”), but they do get a strong response.
Just a heads up, I’m giving The Motion App a test run, and will review soon to see if it’s worth $19/month for a productivity app. (AKA I’m doing the free trial and will share my thoughts).
B. In related news, I may have some room in the coming months to help people and companies looking for a big ramp up in sales and new customers through digital marketing.
I’m not taking clients yet, but you can learn a bit more at sethtowerhurd.io.
More to come soon.
With that being said, let’s dive into Culture & Commentary.
[one]
We need to talk about the kids getting high.
Not the teenagers.
The KIDS.
The number of young kids, especially toddlers, who accidentally ate marijuana-laced treats rose sharply over five years as pot became legal in more places in the U.S., according to a study published Tuesday.
More than 7,000 confirmed cases of kids younger than 6 eating marijuana edibles were reported to the nation’s poison control centers between 2017 and 2021, climbing from about 200 to more than 3,000 per year.
Nearly a quarter of the children wound up hospitalized, some seriously ill, according to a new analysis in the journal Pediatrics.
And those are just the reported cases, said Dr. Marit Tweet, a medical toxicologist with the Southern Illinois School of Medicine, who led the study.
Cases of kids eating pot products such as candies, chocolate and cookies have coincided with more states allowing medical and recreational cannabis use. Currently 37 U.S. states permit use of marijuana for medical purposes and 21 states regulate adult recreational use.
Marijuana will be legal in my current home state of Missouri in two weeks, which I voted for as a non-user…because enforcing a ban doesn’t seem to be worth the trouble for law enforcement. In St. Louis, people can just drive 10 minutes to Illinois to purchase legally, so why bother keeping it illegal in Missouri? There’s far too much violent crime in the metro to pull police resources to the Devil’s Lettuce.
But I’m for VERY harsh penalties for people who are so stupid that they can’t lock up their edibles and allow kids to get into them.
[two]
The actors from the 1968 film version of Rome & Juliet are suing over being forced into child pornography.
Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, the former teen actors who starred in the 1968 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, are now suing Paramount over a nude scene from the film, accusing the studio of sexually exploiting them and distributing nude images of adolescent children.
According to the lawsuit obtained by Variety, Hussey and Whiting—who were 15 and 16 at the time, respectively—allege that they were filmed nude without their knowledge for the famous bedroom scene that show's Hussey's bare breasts and Whiting's buttocks.
The actors, who are now in their 70s, claim that director Franco Zeffirelli assured them there would be no nudity in the film, and that they would wear flesh-colored undergarments for the bedroom scene. However, they are now accusing Zeffirelli of pressuring them to perform in the nude with just body makeup in the final days of filming, allegedly telling them that "the Picture would fail," if they didn't comply.
Hussey and Whiting allege that they were shown where the cameras would be positioned and that Zeffirelli insisted that no nudity would be photographed or released in the film, though they were ultimately filmed without their knowledge, according to the legal docs.
As someone who’s worked with the Hollywood machine…I’m not surprised.
I’m a huge fan of movies and TV (obviously), but the grim reality is that American entertainment is built on a grim foundation of explotation, selfishness, rape (see: Harvey Weinstein), manipulation…and even child porn in mainstream releases.
But unlike the Amazon story (see below), there isn’t a single entity to boycott or abstain from. You never know what nefarious individuals worked on a project behind the scenes, or what horrific deals were done behind the scenes to get a project to the screen.
But when those industry insider stories do come to light…they are disturbing.
Oh, and the weirdest part of the Romeo & Juliet story? This child porn picture earned a rating of PG.
[three]
Well, Amazon doesn’t win ‘em all.
Physical bookstores are back. Not only is Barnes & Noble opening new stores at a fast clip thanks to a cash injection from Private Equity, but independent booksellers are experiencing a renaissance, after getting nearly wiped out by COVID.
Two years ago, the future of independent book selling looked bleak. As the coronavirus forced retailers to shut down, hundreds of small booksellers around the United States seemed doomed. Bookstore sales fell nearly 30 percent in 2020, U.S. Census Bureau data showed. The publishing industry was braced for a blow to its retail ecosystem, one that could permanently reshape the way readers discover and buy books.
Instead, something unexpected happened: Small booksellers not only survived the pandemic, but many are thriving.
“It’s kind of shocking when you think about what dire straits the stores were in in 2020,” said Allison Hill, the chief executive of the American Booksellers Association, a trade organization for independent bookstores. “We saw a rally like we’ve never seen before.”
Many stores have also seen a bump in profits. In a survey of booksellers earlier this year, the association found that some 80 percent of respondents said they saw higher sales in 2021 than in 2020, and nearly 70 percent said their sales last year were higher than 2019, Ms. Hill said.
At Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston, revenue was up by 20 percent in 2021, and the store made more money last year than it did in 2019, according to the owner, Valerie Koehler. Mitchell Kaplan, the founder of Books & Books, an independent chain in South Florida, said sales were up more than 60 percent in 2021 compared to 2020.
Just a couple of months ago I told a contact on Twitter that it wasn’t reasonable to ditch Amazon…but in 2023, my wife and I are doing just that (so far).
Our Prime membership didn’t auto-renew, and we decided to just live without Amazon for awhile. And now that we’ve been in a house with ample storage for a couple of years…I’m finally switching back to paper books.
And if we’re buying paper books…it may just be worth the effort to buy local and skip the company that just bailed on supporting charities and makes workers urinate in bottles.
So far, it seems that the Amazon addiction quickly wanes when items take longer than two days to show up.
[four]
Ticketmaster has held a stranglehold on music, sports and theater tickets for decades, often charging absurd fees…with consumers left with no other choice but to pay, or skip the event.
However, independent country artist Zach Bryan is finding a way to fight back.
Zach Bryan, 2022’s breakout country star, has made good on his strongly stated vow to avoid Ticketmaster for his next tour, as he announced a spring/summer 2023 tour that will use AXS for ticketing purposes, via a “Fair AXS” registration system.
Bryan, who complained about ticket prices and practices over a period of months on Twitter last year, seems to have had his concerns assuaged by AXS, with systems put in place designed to keep secondary ticket sellers out of the picture and even prevent individual buyers from reselling their tickets at a profit.
Registration for a shot at getting tickets is open now through Jan. 29 at 10 p.m. ET at http://www.axs.com/zachbryan. After that, the announcement says, fans will be “randomly selected to purchase tickets” and notified via email with instructions about how to proceed, starting Feb. 13. The language emphasizes that receiving the email offer after registering is not a guarantee of being able to purchase tickets, indicating just how heavy a response Bryan is expecting to get for the shows.
Wait, Zach Bryan just beat Ticketmaster AND defeated scalpers?
Cue the Jeff Goldbloom meme…
As a reminder, Zach Bryan hates Ticketmaster so much that he named his live album All My Homies Hate Ticketmaster.
[five]
As always, let’s wrap up this issue with a pop culture roundup…
Video-game-to-screen adaptation The Last of Us touched down on HBO with a bang this week. The debut episode was the network’s second biggest new series opening since 2010, trailing only House of the Dragon, a prequel riding the coattails of Game of Thrones.
I haven’t watched it yet, but the online buzz is nearly universal that this is a great show—assuming you don’t mind zombie-ish things and apocalyptic storylines.
Michael B. Jordan (Creed, Black Panther) continues his streak as an A-Lister continues with the announcement that the Friday Night Lights alum has been tapped by director Chad Stahelski, most famous for helming the blockbuster John Wick series (which this publication admittedly over-covers).
Stahelski, a stuntman turned director (and it shows in his work) is also tackling a Highlander remake with former Superman actor Henry Cavill.
Oh, and Stahelski is also hard at work on John Wick 4, John Wick 5, The Continental (a John Wick spinoff), Ballerina (a John Wick spinoff featuring Ana De Armas of Knives Out and No Time to Die fame) and a video-game-to-movie adaptation of the Playstation IP Ghost of Tsushima.
The most solid show on Disney+, The Mandalorian, returns for season 3 starting on March 1st.
Allison Brie (Community, GLOW) teamed up with her real life husband Dave Franco (Mad Men, If Beale Street Could Talk) to write Somebody I Used to Know, a romantic dramedy about a workaholic who returns to her hometown to re-discover an old flame.
Looks good, but I’m currently off of Amazon. Dang it. On Prime Video 02/10.
Reese Witherspoon made her millions as a rom-com lead, but then pivoted once she realized there weren’t roles for women in their 30’s, going on to form a production company that carved out a new lane in entertainment, with hits like Wild, Big Little Lies and Little Fires Everywhere (and the miss that was Where the Crawdads Sing).
Now Witherspoon seems to be returning to her rom com roots (read: make the money back from a MASSIVE flop with Crawdads).
Until the next one,
-sth