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The haul of counterfeit swag sprawled across 15 feet of prime display table in a Midtown Manhattan hotel.

Stacks of football jerseys, with the names of stars like Peyton Manning and Russell Wilson. Heaps of knit watch caps, embroidered with the fierce-beaked bird logo of the Seattle Seahawks, or the strapping, bucking horse of the Denver Broncos. T-shirts and baseball caps, propped against boxes that were marked “Homeland Security EVIDENCE.”

That was just a taste of at least 202,000 items seized by federal agents in recent weeks because they had bogus National Football League trademarks. The rest will remain in warehouses until it is no longer needed as evidence, said John Sandweg, the acting director of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement division.

And then?

“Then it is destroyed,” Mr. Sandweg said.

With much of the country in the steeliest grip of winter, Mr. Sandweg was asked if there weren’t better uses for the clothing than shipping it to industrial shredders or incinerators.

“It’s counterfeit — what else can we do with it?” Mr. Sandweg said.

He added: “We are required to destroy it by law.”

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P. J. Tucker, a forward with the Phoenix Suns, really likes sneakers. He likes them so much, in fact, that he needs four locations to store his collection.

He keeps some at his home in Phoenix, where about 200 pairs are piled in boxes next to his bed. He stacks others in the locker room at US Airways Center, where he occupies two stalls.

His mother has been gracious enough to stow several dozen at her home. She was, after all, the person who enabled his shoe-buying habit as a child, driving him to a Footaction store whenever the latest pair of Jordans was available.

And then there is the climate-controlled warehouse in North Carolina, not far from where he grew up, where Tucker stashes the bulk of his 2,000-pair collection. He does his best to label the boxes; otherwise, he might forget what he owns.

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A new map from Reddit user Alexandr Trubetskoy (a.k.a. atrubetskoy) is sure to stoke this regional competition. Using data “taken from hundreds of various points from user responses…interpolated using NOAA’s average annual snowfall days map,” Trubetskoy made a map showing how much snow it typically takes to close schools in the U.S. and Canada. Notice that for much of the southern U.S., all it takes is “any snow” to shut schools down. For the Upper Midwest and Canada, two feet of snow are required for a closure.

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Nintendo, which is based in Kyoto, Japan, said revenue in the first three quarters of the current fiscal year, or through December, fell to 499 billion yen, or $4.83 billion, from ¥543 billion a year earlier.

Nintendo’s president and other executives said they would take a pay cut for five months to take responsibility for the poor performance. The pay of the president, Satoru Iwata, will be cut in half.

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“But anyway, did you hear about the time Beyoncé rejected a work by Lena Dunham’s mom? A fun anecdote: Jay Z wanted to buy “Walking Gun,” one of the most famous images by noted feminist artist Laurie Simmons, which depicts doll legs sticking out of the end of a pistol. (And you thought Tiny Furniture wasn’t autobiographical!) But once it arrived, Beyoncé promptly shipped it back, opting for a less gun-glorifying piece with a perfume bottle on it.”

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As society has reached a consensus that there’s no way to control everything children see, the number of indecency complaints has decreased significantly. When Miley Cyrus twerked at the Video Music Awards last summer, the FCC received only 161 complaints (of course, as a cable channel, MTV doesn’t answer to the commission anyway). The moment became fodder for celebrity bloggers and morning show chatterboxes but was never treated as a problem that needed to be legislated away. The PTC dutifully issued a statement denouncing MTV for “sexually exploiting young women,” but no national outcry resulted. Perhaps not coincidentally, CBS never actually paid a fine in connection with Nipplegate — an appeals court ruled in 2008 and again in 2011 that CBS could not be held liable for the actions of contracted performing artists and that the FCC had acted arbitrarily in enforcing indecency policies. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2012.

So for Powell, the halftime show represents “the last great moment” of a TV broadcast becoming a national controversy — the last primal scream of a public marching inexorably toward a new digital existence: “It might have been essentially the last gasp. Maybe that was why there was so much energy around it. The Internet was coming into being, it was intensifying. People wanted one last stand at the wall. It was going to break anyway. I think it broke.

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“The battle over the merit of trap isn’t about quality control. It’s really a collision of differing sets of criteria for what makes a good MC. Much of the objection to the Futures, Keefs and Flockas stems from the prevailing view that they can’t rap. This is a line of thinking steeped in a very specific and restrictive idea of what makes a good MC. It prizes lyrical dexterity almost to abstraction. Rhyming words really quickly is an important building block of good rap, but awful rap has come along that treasures it, and great rap has happened in its absence. Eminem’s last three solo albums are master classes in wordplay whose soullessness and stringency make them hard to listen to. Flockaveli’s lyricism is chantlike and methodically simplistic, but it is the gold standard for modern aggressive party rap. There’s more than one axis for measuring good rap, and classifying a Keef as awful just because he doesn’t stack up on the lyrical miracle axis ignores the terse and subtly influential brand of pop rap songwriting he mines on Finally Rich.”

– http://ift.tt/1eaP0ZZ

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