Not so interesting- fallacious irrelevancy

In his autobiography _Crazy From The Heat_, David Lee Roth explains why the touring rider for Van Halen's first big 24-semitrailer stadium tour included, buried down around item 126 or so, something like "a bowl of M&M's in the dressing room reception area, with no brown M&Ms".

The *reason* for this item, which looked pretty goofy, and of which much light and fuss was made when it leaked to the public -- and which the band never admitted to at the time, *because it would then stop working* -- was that theirs was the first tour with lots of really heavy equipment rigged way up over top of tens of thousands of audience members, and they were thoughtful enough to realize that if they killed a substantial number of those because someone had not done their job properly, no one would ever do that kind of tour again -- quite aside from it ending their careers and possibly putting them up for manslaughter charges.

So they put the Brown M&M rule in the rider, and that gave them an easy way to check whether the promoter had properly read the rider, and implemented everything on it. They did, in fact, once come in and find brown M&Ms in the bowl, and they stopped everything and did a full inspection of the rig... and as I remember it, did find some dangerous practices, which they had corrected before showtime.

So things like that may in fact have non-obvious but desirable side effects, which drive why they exist. If you need more on this, go watch GI Jane, and find out how hard it is to become a SEAL. And why. And think about how many places the Linux kernel is now. And how many places it's going. )