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Lucky

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Posts posted by Lucky

    What caused the decay of San Francisco?

    in The Lounge

    Posted

    Throwing money at the homeless has not proven to be a successful solution. It does create jobs for those already having homes, and we know that bureaucrats will do anything to keep their bureau growing. I do favor mandatory confinement for the homeless that are mentally ill, and mandatory live-in treatment for the drug addicted. Beyond that, helping people in need never goes out of favor...

    What are You Reading?

    in Literature

    Posted

    I just finished reading Farrell Covington and the Limits of Style by Paul Rudnick. It is a very likable gay romance novel about a very handsome rich kid and an aspiring young playwright. Lots of history, lots of sex. Pretty good book. Not that it didn't irritate me a time or two.

    I-bonds

    in Personal Finance & Investing

    Posted

    On 6/17/2023 at 7:51 AM, Lucky said:

    Could someone please indulge my lack of knowledge here? I bought my I-bond on May 9, 2022.  I understand I cannot cash it in for three months after the first  year without penalty. So if I cash it in on August 9th, do I get all the interest earned to that date?

    My account shows no interest earned at all, 15 months after purchase.

    Why Is Taylor Swift So Popular?

    in Music

    Posted

    The NY Times tried to answer my question today. The article is behind a paywall and I don't know how to "gift" it here, so some excerpts;

    The pop superstar’s tour, which is now finishing its initial North American leg with six nights at SoFi Stadium outside Los Angeles, has been both a business and a cultural juggernaut. Swift’s catalog of generation-defining hits and canny marketing sense have helped her achieve a level of white-hot demand and media saturation not seen since the 1980s heyday of Michael Jackson and Madonna — a dominance that the entertainment business had largely accepted as impossible to replicate in the fragmented 21st century.

    “The only thing I can compare it to is the phenomenon of Beatlemania,” said Billy Joel, who attended Swift’s show in Tampa, Fla., with his wife and young daughters.

    Although Swift, 33, and her promoters do not publicly report box-office figures, the trade publication Pollstar estimated that she has been selling about $14 million in tickets each night. By the end of the full world tour, which is booked with 146 stadium dates well into 2024, Swift’s sales could reach $1.4 billion or more — exceeding Elton John’s $939 million for his multiyear farewell tour, the current record-holder.

    Swift has now had more No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 over the course of her career than any other woman, surpassing Barbra Streisand. With the tour lifting Swift’s entire body of work, she has placed 10 albums on that chart this year and is the first living artist since the trumpeter and bandleader Herb Alpert in 1966 to have four titles in the Top 10 at the same time.

    But how did a concert tour become so much more: fodder for gossip columns, the subject of weather reports, a boon for friendship-bracelet beads — the unofficial currency of Swiftie fandom — and the reason nobody could get a hotel room in Cincinnati at the end of June?

     

    “She is the best C.E.O., and best chief marketing officer, in the history of music,” said Nathan Hubbard, a longtime music and ticketing executive who co-hosts a Swift podcast. “She is following people like Bono, Jay-Z and Madonna, who were acutely aware of their brands. But of all of them, Taylor is the first one to be natively online.”

    The Taylorpalooza extends to every level of the news media, which began the coverage cycle by chronicling Swift’s ticketing fiasco last November, when fans — and scalpers’ bots — crushed Ticketmaster’s systems, leading to a heated Senate Judiciary hearing. Since then, seemingly no nugget of Swift news has escaped coverage, from the stars in the stands to oddities like a Seattle concert that, according to one researcher, shook the ground with an intensity equivalent to a 2.3-magnitude earthquake.

    Music critics have portrayed the Eras Tour as showing Swift at the top of her game as a media-savvy, big-tent talent, a pop star with a knack for grand spectacle as well as the polished artistry of a classic songwriter.

    Shania Twain, the country-pop star whose career in some ways prefigured Swift’s, caught the Las Vegas stop of the Eras Tour, a 44-plus song production that goes as long as three and a half hours. She praised Swift’s “beautiful balance” of high-tech stagecraft and intimate performance segments. “I have to applaud her,” Twain said in a telephone interview. “As a performer, I know that work that goes into it.”

    The power of Swift’s fan army — and fear of crossing the star, or even appearing to — has kept nearly all of the press about the tour sunny. Though some fans (and parents) balked at the ticket prices and challenges of securing seats, most frustration was directed squarely at Ticketmaster, not Swift. After a few weeks of headlines romantically linking Swift with a frontman some fans considered to be problematic, reports spread in the celebrity pages that they had split. (Swift’s representatives declined to comment for this article.)

    For fans, the shows are a pilgrimage, and a rediscovery of the joys of mass gatherings. Flights are packed with Swifties, and travelers trade stories and compare outfits — drawn from looks associated with Swift “eras” — in stadium corridors and parking lots. In Kansas City, the comedian Nikki Glaser was attending her eighth show, a commitment that she estimated has cost her $25,000.

    “This year I decided not to freeze my eggs,” Glaser said. “I’m going to put that money toward the thing I love most in the world, which is Taylor Swift.”

     

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