• All the life story rights are vested in this company and we have not yet granted anyone the official rights to the story.
• Chilean attorney Guillermo Carey • Discussing what the Chilean miners plan to do with their made-for-a-movie story. Rather than just letting any one of the guys individually release a book and fight for the movie rights (and thereby splitting the Chilean miner film market), they plan to do everything together, possibly as a massive package deal. The deal would mean that the miners would stand behind a single book and film deal, possibly with a multilevel promotional push that would make Brangelina jealous. We can’t wait to play the Chilean miner video game on our Nintendo Wii. We bet it’d be called “Run Inside of This Room for 69 Days.” Or possibly even a branded reboot of the “Lemmings” franchise. source

• tea And why the hell not? The Tea Party actually got many of their candidates in office – that’s pretty huge.
• hamid Karzai, the loose cannon on top of the Afghan power grid, still gives U.S. leaders many headaches.
• julian We know about Julian Assange. Dude has been in the news every day for a freaking month now.
• miners If you were stuck underground for like two months, you’d want an award too, right? We sure would.

• $20 million cost, but goddamn, that was some good TV

• » So, who pays the bill? Well, you would assume the mining company that owned the mine, San Esteban Primera, but they’re nearly broke. So state-owned company Codelco has owned the effort, paying $15 million of the total cost, with private firms paying the rest. Expect lawsuits and criminal charges.

And here are the big winners:

• 3.4 million number of viewers CNN got in the first hour of the rescue
• 7 million number of viewers Fox News got in the final hour of the mining escapade

• 4M pageviews per minute on news sites at the peak of the mining incident
• $7,000 worth of sunglasses given away to the miners by Oakley
• $41Mthe amount of free advertising Oakley got in the process source

• KNOW HOW WE KNOW THIS IS A HUGE STORY? Because CNN put their headlines IN ALL CAPS. SCREAMING. CONGRATS!

• 65 days for the drill to reach the trapped miners (whew!) source

• 33 miners are stuck in a Chilean mine, which kinda sucks a lot
• 17 the amount of time they’ve been stuck in the mine (yikes)
• one the number of notes rescuers have saying that they’re OK source