This week must be the week all electronics in my household die. First the laptop, now my DVD player went tits up. The back-up isn’t progressive scan.
Grrr.
BTW- Is this a Zappa reference, or did this phrase appear somewhere else, first:
THANKS, GUYS! Army of Davids is now up to #78 on Amazon, which isn’t bad for a book that doesn’t come out for over a month. Keep those pre-orders coming; they’re much appreciated!
UPDATE: #66! With a bullet!
Just curious.
neil
What’s going on today? Is Pajamas Media starting a new viral ad campaign for power conditioners or something?
DougJ
With a bullet means it’s rising up the charts. I think it predates Zappa.
yet another jeff
Yeah, 50’s DJ…post-McCarthy…but pre-Payola.
Aaron
I believe that Billboard charts indicate quickly rising or new singles with a bullet point. To be “number one with a bullet” means you either debuted at number one or got there very quickly, indicating a huge success.
a guy called larry
Yeah. This question is asked with some regularity, I guess. Zappa didn’t have to worry about that much, but Volman and Kaylan did, I think, in The Turtles.
ppGaz
“With a bullet” means “increasing rapidly.”
On a record “hit” chart, which is actually a sales chart, a bullet indicates rapidly increasing sales.
“Number three with a bullet” indicates that the item is probably going to move up the chart quickly.
The “bullet” was a bullet-shaped symbol used on the chart to indicate the items that were rising rapidly.
Yes, I’d say it predated Frank Zappa.
The “rapidly rising” reference is from Webster’s New World College Dictionary (“bullet”, 5)
Par R
I assume this is a reference to the new book by Professor Glenn Reynolds.
Gary Farber
“First the laptop, now my DVD player went tits up.”
Curiously, my DVD player also died, for no visible reason, three days ago, with a Battlestar Galactica disk in it. It was 55 weeks old.
:-(
I do have a backup in the computer, which I live in terror of a problem with, because I couldn’t possibly afford to fix it if one developed. And the idea of going back to the Pentium I backup with the 33k modem (instead of the speedy 49k I’m limited to in the modern one) is horrific.