The Downward Distribution of Purple, Green, and Gold.

The throw comes from above. This is the first fact to grasp about Carnival in New Orleans: the beads, cups, and doubloons descend from masked riders on rolling floats to a crowd that has assembled, by long custom, in the posture of supplicants, arms raised, palms open.

The desk files this as a governed throw executed from a licensed platform. Each krewe rides under a permit, along a sanctioned route, on a date anchored to the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday. Everything about the delivery is regulated except its aim.

The manifest is generous. Standard throws include strings of beads, aluminum doubloons stamped with the krewe's device, and plastic cups; premium items, the hand-decorated Zulu coconut and the Muses shoe, are released sparingly and caught like relics.

The transaction has its liturgy. The recipient of record is simply whoever catches, and eligibility is asserted aloud: "Throw me something, mister," a phrase old enough to function as a standing purchase order.

The goods have drifted. The earliest beads were glass, strung in Bohemia and imported through the last century; today they arrive by the container from Chinese factories in the official palette Rex fixed in 1872, purple for justice, green for faith, gold for power.

Authority, for one afternoon, rains trinkets on anyone willing to reach for them.

The volume defies polite estimate. A single season sends millions of pounds of plastic into the streets, most of it caught, worn briefly, and abandoned by Ash Wednesday.

The chain of custody has an unglamorous terminus. In 2018 one cleanup pulled roughly ninety-three thousand pounds of beads from five blocks of Canal Street storm drains, the throw's final disposition being, as it so often is, a catch basin.

What the desk records is the consent of the arrangement. No rider aims, no catcher is promised anything, and yet the exchange runs for weeks on nothing but raised hands and a shared understanding of which way the goods will fall.

Compliance verdict: A governed throw with an ungoverned destination and a documented drainage problem. The krewes clear their manifest, the crowd clears the air, and the city clears the storm drains, in that order, every year.