
Why Van Halen's tour contract had a "no brown M&M's" clause - magsafe
http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp
======
Monkeyget
It reminds me of the orange juice test. You organize an annual convention for
hundreds of people.

You tell the banquet manager of the hotel you are considering that the morning
breakfast must include a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice for
everyone of the attendees. It must be squeezed no more than two hours before
the breakfast.

It is not possible to do so. Squeezing that much orange in much a short amount
of time would be prohibitively expensive.

If the manager says yes he is either lying or incompetent and you'd better
find someone else who will tell you it's not possible.

~~~
raverbashing
[http://www.amazon.com/Commercial-Orange-Squeezer-Machine-
rep...](http://www.amazon.com/Commercial-Orange-Squeezer-Machine-
replacement/dp/B0068OK27S)

~~~
newaccountfool
That would work, can do 7 glasses a min. That means means 420 glasses an hour,
which would be 840 glasses in the two hours. The question was about hundreds
of guests and not thousands so your operating at the top range of that.

Definitely possible!

~~~
gambiting
Even if it was about thousands of guests, you can buy more than one machine.
The only question is, how much is the client willing to pay?

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
Large commercial hotel. It's not impossible they don't have this sort of
equipment already.

The problem with checks like this is that you need to be intimately aware of
the capabilities of an organisation to know whether it's reasonable or not. As
people who work with technology know, things that seem impossible to the
uninitiated can be remarkably trivial. We should probably assume that others
have similarly impressive capabilities in areas we don't understand.

The advantage of the Van Halen test over this is that it's simple for
everyone. This seems needlessly "clever" and is as a result wrong...

------
JonnieCache
This seems like a good opportunity to post RMS' rider again:

[https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developer...](https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/pipermail/developers-
public/2011-October/007647.html)

Fabulous stuff. I wonder how often he has/gets to hang out with random parrots
since this document became widely known. In my mind he is surrounded
constantly by sandal-wearing acolytes wielding exotic birds of every variety.

~~~
netcan
This is a fantastic read!

 _If you have previously done streaming using some streaming service and you
can 't immediately name the format it uses, chances are it is unacceptable and
I won't let you use it for my speech._

 _..This might seem unfair--if a ticket is lost, it could be my fault. But my
income is not large, and I cannot afford to assume this risk myself if the
event offers me no income. The frustration I feel when I suffer such a loss is
excruciating. It is better for me to decline to travel to a certain place than
to take such a risk._

 _..DON 'T make a hotel reservation until we have fully explored other
options. If there is anyone who wants to offer a spare couch, I would much
rather stay there than in a hotel (provided I have a door I can close, in
order to have some privacy)... ... If you have found a person for me to stay
with, please forward this section and the two following sections to that
person._

 _..find out what temperature it can actually lower a room to, during the
relevant dates ..I like cats if they are friendly. ..Dogs that bark angrily
and /or jump up on me frighten me .. .. find a host for me that has a friendly
parrot.. ..DON'T buy a parrot figuring that it will be a fun surprise for me.
To acquire a parrot is a major decision: it is likely to outlive you. If you
don't know how to treat the parrot, it could be emotionally scarred and spend
many decades feeling.._

 _I do NOT use browsers, I use the SSH protocol.. .. If a hotel says "We have
internet access.. .. What parameters does the user need to specify in order to
talk with it?… … Don't rely on information from such a person--talk to someone
who knows! .. their phone switchboard may not recognize the tones produced by
modems.._

 _When you need to tell me about a problem in a plan, please do not start with
a long apology. That is unbearably boring. …If I am typing on my computer and
it is time to do something else, please tell me. Don 't wait for me to "finish
working" first, because you would wait forever. I have to squeeze in answering
mail at every possible opportunity, which includes whenever I have to wait. I
wait by working. If instead of telling me there is no more need for me to
wait, you wait for me to stop waiting for you, we will both wait forever -- or
until I figure out what's happening. … Please don't try to pressure me to
"relax" instead, and fall behind on my work_

 _I do not eat breakfast. Please do not ask me any questions about ..what I
will do breakfast. ..Please just do not bring it up .. If there is a chance to
see folk dancing… … If you want to give me data about airplane tickets, please
send that info as plain ASCII text_

What a beautiful crazy person RMS is.

~~~
arrrg
You know, I just read this again. I first read it in a ridiculing context
(“Parrots? Really?”) and didn’t think much to put it out of that context, but
looking at it now I have to say my view on it has changed.

I think it’s pretty alright, actually.

Some of his demands have to do with his strong ethical views on software, and
while I don’t agree completely with him on this, I certainly can respect him
for being uncompromising on that.

He frequently emphasises the need to communicate. Decisions that affect both
him and the host have to be decided together. He also shows quite some
willingness to find alternate solutions if his preferred solution is somehow
not possible, but emphasises the need to communicate about those changes.

All the rest may be slightly quirky, but it’s all not especially hard to do
with some care and attention. Hey, he doesn’t even want super-accomodating
hospitality.

(Also, hotel internet is the worst. Good on him for insisting that be properly
checked. He needs it to work, after all.)

~~~
rmc
_Some of his demands have to do with his strong ethical views on software, and
while I don’t agree completely with him on this, I certainly can respect him
for being uncompromising on that._

If you're going to host a talk from RMS, I'd presume you'd be aware that he
has strong ethical views. I mean, that's one of the main reasons to get him to
talk!

~~~
ceejayoz
> If you're going to host a talk from RMS, I'd presume you'd be aware that he
> has strong ethical views.

Not necessarily. Think about the White House Correspondents Dinner that
invited Colbert as the host. Somehow they thought he'd pull his punches.

------
emiliobumachar
Engineer's version: Write-only memory

" Out of frustration with the long and seemingly useless chain of approvals
required of component specifications during which no actual checking seemed to
occur, an engineer at Signetics once created a specification for a write-only
memory and included it with a bunch of other specifications to be approved.
This inclusion came to the attention of Signetics management only when regular
customers started calling and asking for pricing information. Signetics
published a corrected edition of the data book and requested the return of the
'erroneous' literature."

------
bane
One of the interesting things about tech work is that it's almost all "brown
M&Ms". It's amazing how important attention to detail is in this field and how
quickly something will simply not work if the details aren't sweated.

We see it time and again when things go into production where the "brown M&Ms"
haven't been looked into and we end up with things like enterprise class
websites that cost millions of dollars to produce crumbling under the load of
a dozen simultaneous users.

------
Nanzikambe
A contract "poison pill" or litmus test. Pretty ingenious, is that sort of
thing common practice in contracts?

~~~
herghost
That's something that I've done with data processing and security contracts
for the last 4 or 5 years. It's an addendum to the main commercial contract
and is deliberately long. Almost all of it is non-exceptional "just do it
right" kind of stuff, but there are a handful of clauses I've put in that
absolutely no company could reasonably agree to. If they agree to it without
challenging those clauses, I then know that I am going to need to grill them
on the detail of everything that they do. It's proved very effective for me.

edit: I actually refer to them as my "Brown M&M Clauses" too!

~~~
btown
What are some examples of these clauses, if you don't mind sharing them?
Presumably you don't actually ask for brown M&Ms, but rather for something
technical and infeasible.

~~~
herghost
for example, the right to audit their premises at our convenience and their
expense without giving notice.

There is a legit requirement for us to be able to audit, but placing the other
conditions on it makes it, at the very least, unreasonable but the "without
notice" bit means that if they agree to it we have can disrupt their business
at our leisure (since an audit requires their resources to conduct too).

another example is requesting infeasible levels of application logging, insane
retention periods, and onerous evidence that they're acting on that
information.

------
gnyman
There are quite a few applications that do something similar, they leave a
"disabled=1" or similar in the config to make sure people look at the config
before trying to run the software. I remember the eggdrop IRC bot doing it
([http://cvs.eggheads.org/viewvc/eggdrop1.6/eggdrop.conf?view=...](http://cvs.eggheads.org/viewvc/eggdrop1.6/eggdrop.conf?view=co)
, look for the lines starting with die) this and I'm sure there are more.

~~~
edwintorok
The ClamAV daemon also ship with a config file containing a line 'Example'. As
long as the line is there it'll refuse to start.

------
exDM69
I recall reading that the "no brown M&M's" clause was added after a near-fatal
accident on stage where a member of the Van Halen band got electrocuted
because of bad wiring on the stage.

~~~
orblivion
Just a friendly FYI: "electrocuted" implies a fatality. (I learned this
similarly on an internet forum I posted the word to years ago.)

~~~
cbr
Really?
[https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Aelectrocute](https://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Aelectrocute)

    
    
        injure or kill someone by electric shock

~~~
syncsynchalt
It's a portmanteau of electric + execution.

It's been misused so often that the non-fatal meaning is becoming a separate
line item in the definition, but the parent comment is correct.

~~~
cbr
By that argument "electrocution" for "accidental death by electric shock" is
also misuse, as the initial definition was "execution via electricity".

------
spingsprong
An episode of the TRC podcast covered this, and came to a different conclusion
than snopes.

[http://www.trcpodcast.com/trc-219-can-men-and-women-be-
frien...](http://www.trcpodcast.com/trc-219-can-men-and-women-be-friends-
foods-with-animals-van-halen-mms/)

~~~
StavrosK
What was the conclusion, for those of us who can't listen?

~~~
spingsprong
Technical requests are usually handled by different people than catering and
hospitality requests.

The people in charge catering and hospitality would not be expected to read
the technical requests to do with electronic and sound systems, and vice
versa.

The guy at the TRC podcast actually searched out their contracts, and the
brown M&M clause isn't in the middle of technical requirements, but is in the
hospitality section among requests of meals, beverages and dressing room
requirements, and there's no mention that the concert would be cancelled if
brown M&Ms were found.

So seems unlikely to be true, and just be the guy from Van Halen telling a fun
story.

~~~
ginko
> So seems unlikely to be true, and just be the guy from Van Halen telling a
> fun story.

Either that or the no brown M&M's clause became so well known later on that it
wasn't useful as a litmus test anymore.

------
JunkDNA
See previous HN discussion (360 points, 1,744 days ago) here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743860](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743860)

------
YesThatTom2
Once I buried a crazy request in a list of "you need to agree on these points
or the book won't make the deadline" email to my publisher. My editor flat out
agreed to them all.

That's how I knew she was lying about having read them and I had to escalate
to the production editor.

It saved the book.

------
dvanduzer
You can listen to Ira Glass and John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants talk
about it in the prologue: [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/386/f...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/386/fine-print?act=0)

"there's 30 people the promoter's going to hire on our behalf ... but in only
half of them did we require that they be sober"

------
rhizome
Contrary to Snopes' last-updated, this is at least 10 years old.

Summary/spoiler: It was to ensure the contract was read thoroughly.

~~~
Yuioup
The website is running on ASP Classic (.asp)

~~~
stan_rogers
The .asp extension actually tells you nothing other than that the .asp
extension was used. On the balance of probabilities, it's likely the case that
the site runs on ASP classic on a Windows server, but it could as easily have
been moved to, say, the LAMP stack configured (using httpd.conf or .htaccess)
to invoke PHP when files bearing the .asp extension are requested. It's not a
common thing to do, but it can be the easiest way to solve the link rot
problem.

~~~
arethuza
According to the headers it returns it seems to be IIS 5 - which is quite
impressively old (Windows 2000 era).

Of course, they could be faking that - but not sure why anyone would try.

~~~
icholboy
Security through obscurity?

------
Roonerelli
I’ve heard similar stories regarding developers and IT Services

Where the devs weren’t allowed access to the Production environment so would
have to leave written instructions on how to deploy the software they’ve
written. And convinced that IT Services weren’t reading their instructions
they would write something really offensive in there and see if they
complained

Possibly just a myth, but amusing all the same

~~~
lmm
Link for the interested: [http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-
Symbolic-Install...](http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Classic-WTF-Symbolic-
Installation.aspx)

------
saurik
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839581](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839581)

~~~
andreif
inception :)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743860](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743860)

------
ctdonath
I've read thru a bunch of other nit-picky riders. Strikes me that an under-
discussed factor is that these high-value stars (contracts running into the
$millions) are under _extreme_ pressure, which is severely aggravated by so
much change on a daily/hourly basis; something as "trivial" as wrong-
temperature or brand drinks (I dislike Poland Spring water, and prefer Mt Dew
in cans not bottles), uncomfortable seats, or even brown M&Ms (hey, everyone
has a pet peeve) can be an unnerving "last straw". Having a few "perfect"
arrangements everywhere gives them something to center on for mental
stability.

ETA: I realize this is a tangent. Methinks it's relevant.

~~~
salehenrahman
I'm curious; have you read the linked article?

Because unlike what you stated, the removal of brown M&Ms doesn't have much to
do with comforting the high-value stars, but more like a "flag" that Van Halen
looks for in order to determine whether or not the stage crew has read the
contract properly. If they _did_ read the contract, the crew would have
removed the brown M&Ms. If not, then there is a high likelihood that they have
not read the contract, and not only did they not remove then brown M&Ms, but
they also probably omitted crucial elements in the set-up, possibly to a point
it can be life threatening if omitted.

------
HERRbPUNKT
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwHO2HnwfnA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwHO2HnwfnA)

Interview with Eddy Van Halen, telling the story first hand. :)

~~~
breakall
Cheers for the link! (But that is Diamond Dave telling the story!)

------
harryb
Interesting lesson about getting confidence by adding bugs. This was mentioned
at a recent tech talk about Java Mutation Testing and PIT
[http://pitest.org/](http://pitest.org/) \- video here
[http://vimeo.com/89083982](http://vimeo.com/89083982)

------
salehenrahman
I'm stealing this tactic when interviewing a QA guy, if I ever do end up
looking to hire QA guys, that is.

Me: "So here are a set of instructions are programmers were asked to follow.
Can you see anything wrong"

QA candidate: "Why yes. They forgot to remove the brown M&M's"

Me: "You start tomorrow."

------
bttf
This reminds me of some IRCd configurations, in which the server will not
function properly unless you've thoroughly read through the conf file and
found the single commented line which disables the entire process.

------
yp_all
Maybe a more interesting question is whether they ever exercised their right
to terminate for brown M&M's.

Is there any notion of material breach, major vs minor breach, etc. in "tour
contracts"?

------
sgdread
I've seen same kind of tests on one of the fire ranges. You have to read
safety rules. One of the points was to put x mark on the 2nd page if you read
that.

------
supergeek133
Instantly thought of this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_7kg5ZzDZo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_7kg5ZzDZo)

~~~
circa
me too! i'm surprised there isn't more mention of it.

------
quotha
You have to remember, it was the 80s!

------
circa
How is there no mention of Wayne's World in these comments?

------
pjbrunet
I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand contract law, delivering something
"close enough" is all that's required to satisfy a contract. Let's pretend
everything's perfect except for one brown M&M. I'm sure a lawyer can explain
it better, but if everything else is in order, I think Van Halen would have to
perform their end of the deal.

~~~
icegreentea
In general, you go with 'what would a reasonable person say'. Now, for a rock
concert, the color a backstage M&Ms in isolation is probably not enough to
convince a judge that it was a good reason to break the contract.

But the M&Ms aren't used in isolation. They're used as a flag, where their
presence suggests that the venue did not follow through on their technical
demands. Once you know that, then you just look for problems (probably the
demands immediately around the M&M line first). Once you found an actual
problem, well then, there you go.

~~~
jmadsen
I think it's more likely that they used it as a flag to go double-check the
safety measures.

They made huge money from the concerts, nevermind the fans. They weren't
looking for out-clauses

~~~
cnvogel
...but the whole thing break down as soon as distinct teams are taking care of
catering and checking the venues floor's mechanical load specs, so using this
indicator only makes sense as long as the venues (and the teams working in
them) are sufficiently small.

Nowadays the "big shows" employ teams of dozens of guys travelling and dozens
of helpers employed locally, it would be severely negligent if checking of
basic requirements would only be done only on the basis if the catering guys
met the random demand for colour-sorted sweets.

~~~
Argorak
Even in those organizations, there will be controlling and Q&A. Orgs being
sloppy in one regard are often sloppy in another and probably gave down bad
orders in the one direction _and in the other, too_.

I organize smaller events, but you wouldn't believe the number of f-ups a bad
manager can produce left and right. Often, the "ground crew" isn't even at
fault - e.g. I had events where the ground crew was briefed to a standard
timetable layout, although we had provided a timetable usable for them
beforehand, having them fix a lot of things on the fly.

------
bjourne
Maybe a mathematician can explain whether this "trick" works or not?
Intuitively, I can't see that knowing whether the M&M demand was filled makes
it more probable that the other demands are filled.

Say you have a pile with five black or white marbles. You want them all to be
black. So you check that the first marble in the pile is black (ie no brown
m&m:s). Is it now _more probable_ that _the other four marbles_ also are
black?

Because you are just checking one specific marble instead of sampling a number
of randomly chosen marbles (which of course would increase the probability), I
don't see how it can work.

~~~
collint
Because it's not like marbles. It's not a math thing.

It's more like a canary in the coal mine. If the canary dies, you should check
on the air quality. If they went through the trouble of removing the brown
m&ms you have a fairly strong indicator they actually read the document in the
first place. And a strong indicator they have a good attention to detail.

~~~
masklinn
Exactly, a concept also known as a "litmus test", if you pass the test you may
still fail the actual, but if you fail the litmus test there's more or less no
way you'll pass.

