Getting a ring at Super Bowl

Indianapolis officials are finding that preparing for the Super Bowl ranges from modern high-tech infrastructure to fighting an old – very old – human vice.

The Circle City Super Bowl is expected to draw 70,000 fans and an additional 4,500 members of the media. And those 74,500 people will likely be carrying at least 75,000 cell phones. If every person with a cell phone cannot get access to a cell network, complaints will fly.

So Indianapolis officials are assessing just how much bandwidth they will need to make sure everyone at and around the game can talk and send data. Wireless carriers are working to expand and upgrade their systems in time for the Big Ten football championship on Dec. 3, which may well serve as a test of the system.

While technicians seek to make sure every cell phone works, law enforcement wants women engaging in the world’s oldest profession not to work, especially during Super Bowl week. After warning they planned a crackdown on prostitution, Indianapolis police raided four city massage parlors this week, and the investigations apparently go beyond prostitution to include human trafficking.

And we remember when hosting the Super Bowl meant having enough hotel rooms and parking places.

Queen gets her kicks

The homecoming queen at Pinckney Community High School, near Ann Arbor, Mich., is crowned at halftime of the football game. The New York Times reports the rest of the story.

At the half, Pinckney was holding a 6-0 lead. And in the locker room, the team’s kicker, Brianna Amat, who in her first kick of the season had missed an extra point, was told she was needed on the field.

There, wearing the football uniform of the Pinckney Pirates, she learned she had been named the school’s homecoming queen.

Then in the third quarter, wearing a helmet and not the tiara of the queen, she was asked to kick a field goal.

Which, of course, she did.

Pinckney wins, 9-7.

All hail the queen. And the kicker.

Who pays - and who doesn’t

A popular conservative mantra making the rounds is that only half of Americans pay federal income taxes, and the other half live off them.

Here are the facts, according to Factcheck.org, based on information from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center.

Looking at federal income, Social Security and Medicare taxes, 81.9 percent of Americans pay some form of federal tax on wages and income. Looking at only the federal income tax, 53.6 percent of “tax units” – individuals or couples – pay. And that’s up from the 49.2 percent who paid in 2008 – the last year of the Bush presidency.

Many who don’t pay income taxes benefit from tax credits and exemptions, and do not necessarily receive any welfare. For example, a couple with three children who earned $50,000 in 2010 would see their income lowered by $18,250 in exemptions and $10,000 for the standard deduction, leaving a tax bill of less than $3,000 – which would be wiped out by $3,000 worth of child tax credits. But the couple would have paid $3,100 in payroll taxes, which fund Social Security and Medicare. That bill will drop to $2,100 this year, due to a temporary payroll tax deduction.