in high school my science class went on a field trip to a nuclear reactor and someone asked if it was safe to swim in the pool of water with all the cooling rods at the bottom and the tour guide answered “oh definitely not. you wouldn’t get cancer or anything, you’d just get shot before coming with 10 feet of it”
Tag: story
Today I learned that Van Halen have that rider in their contract about “a bowl of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed” in order to know at a glance if the promoter read the entire contract. And the reason they do THAT is because they once had a stage collapse because a promoter hadn’t read the proper way to set up all the specific technical stuff.
So if the band goes in the dressing room or catering and sees brown M&Ms, they know they have to double-check the stage setup for safety.
I heard about this on Freakonomics Radio. Turns out the bit about no brown M&Ms is HUGE, in BIG font, bold, underlined and quotated like they’re on the Group W Bench.
The band was all, “We have fifty-pound lights hanging over our heads and fire being shot out of cannons. We had to know whether they read our safety regs so we didn’t flamebroil any roadies.”
interesting how this has become a meme in the music industry about divas. i’ve always heard jokes that amount to “this stuck up celebrity hates the green gummy bears!! they’re refusing to perform just for that???” and its reading stuff like this that i realise how that joke might have come about. people get grumpy that the band refuses to play but cant admit its because THEY’RE incompetent, so they make it all about the M&Ms. another example of artists using a creative method to ensure they have a perfectly reasonable request fulfilled that is then bastardised by lazy people who wanna make money off them.
…this is like the music industry version of hearing the truth behind the McDonalds hot coffee lawsuit
i had the best human interaction of all time last night. i was sitting at a bar eating an appetizer and this guy comes up to order a drink and stares at my food and comments how good it looks. when i am drunk i use the word bitch like it is a comma, i plug it into any space in a sentence possible. so naturally the first thing i say to this stranger is, “go ahead and take one, bitch.”
he looks SO shocked and taken aback and goes “what did you just say? how do you know my name?” so i sit there for a moment trying to figure out what the fuck he is talking about, and then go, “…. bitch?” and he looks so relieved and tells me his name is mitch.
i cannot stop thinking about this. oh my god. imagine going into a bar and someone you know for a fact youve never met approaches you and says “go ahead and take one, mitch.” im cracking the fuck up. he looked like he thought this was the fucking truman show
I stopped having celebrity role models ever since ringo starr told me to fuck off when I was 11 that experience was very formative I can never trust another beatle
did he really
God it really did and Im so pissed because I cant even tell the story because it sounds so everyone got up and clapped
you GOTTA tell me this story maude i must know
Well I’m not really used to telling this in text form so I’ll do my best but basically when I was 11 I idolized the beatles and like collected their records and cds, read all their autobiographies, had pics of them hanging ovr my bed and shit… yeah yeah it was a more naive time. But basically since my mom knew I loved them she pulled some of her vegas strings for my birthday and got me into the premiere of the beatles cirque de soleil show. see it, think its kinda lame but too starstruck to care, we get to go to the afterparty and there he is, the man himself, Richard Starky or whateverthefuck…. so naturally I FLIP and go omg ringo youve shaped my young life please can I have a picture w you
And the dude, like. Turns around. And does the most fucking cartoon villain laugh I’ve ever heard in my life. Like, puts his hands over his stomach, takes a deep breath and makes this noise thatd Id describe as Santa Claus mixed with Bowser. And looks me right in my horrified eyes and goes, “No.”
Like, I dont know what to say at this pt. I’m 11, my self esteem was pretty damn low, its not really registering to me that one of my childhood heroes is a fucking DBZ antagonist, instead my first instinct is that I did something wrong or I’m just so damn ugly the very sight of me deeply offended Mr. Starr, so even tho Im starting to cry a bit I awkwardly laugh and apologize for the intrusion. And the dude. He just gives me the smuggest “Yeah, thought so” look ever. And gestures to the other side of the room and goes “fuck off, kid”. Then turns around and resumes his conversation about the finer points of Microsoft paint as a modern art medium or whatever topic I imagine dominates the conversations of such an influential celebrity
But like, and this is the most fake sounding part of it, Julian Lennon (johns son from his first marriage, I think hes a photographer or something) saw all this happen. And like, stands there and comforts me for like 15 minutes. I’m ugly sobbing so loudly at this point, he just like gives me a kiss on my head and says things are gonna be ok. I ask him if I did something wrong. He tells me this happens all the time, the dude just really hates kids and kinda people in general. That raised so many questions for me. Is this a regular occurence? Has he comforted other kids who have had their hearts cruelly ripped out by the menace known as ringo starr, or possibly the other slightly less assholish beatles? Like, he seemed like he was so used to it.
Yeah, I threw out all my beatles shit after that. But thanks julian lennon for stopping me from becoming a supervillain hellbent on destroying the entire nation of britain for good. What a dude. I should check out his photos.
holy shit
when i saw the headline ‘golf digest helps free man from prison’ i thought it was gonna be, like
“he’s clearly in the background of this golf photo! that proves he wasn’t at the crime scene!!”
as opposed to, like
“this guy in prison sent us his cool golf fanart but we didn’t want to promo a serial killer, so we looked into his case and thought it looked pretty flimsy and probably racially motivated”
(here’s the first article from 2012 and the followup)
this was a fucking wild ride in a GOLF MAGAZINE
“It’s embarrassing for the legal system that for a long time the best presentation of the investigation was from a golf magazine.” OH MY GOD
writingmyselfintoanearlygrave:
One day, you lose your wallet, and it is found by a mob boss, who figures out that you aren’t in such a good place financially, and takes pity on you. So they start anonymously sending cash, clothes, and furniture to you in the mail, eventually, the mob boss sends you a letter to stating that they bought you a house, and it lists an adress. What do you do?
In this economy? Thank them politely, pledge your loyalty, and join the mob.
My mattress is strapped to eight roombas and I leave all my doors open at night so the roombas can go where they want to. I wake up where they want me to be. I trust their decisions.
A tradition
In peacetime, the ruler grows their hair long. In war, they cut it short.
A ruler with long hair is held in great esteem, for defending the peace.
The traditional declaration of war is for the ruler to send their cut-off hair to the enemy ruler. The statement carries greater weight the longer the hair: to receive long hair says that you have angered one who is slow to anger, that you have incurred a wrath not easily woken.
Violent war-mongering leader frantically and aggressively tries to shave just a LITTLE hair off the top of their head into an envelope.
A faraway king receives a heavy wooden crate filled with a coil of the longest hair he has ever seen.
A despised ruler finds hundreds of pounds of cut-off ponytails at her castle entrance, each one belonging to her own people.
A young emperor refuses to cut their hair and insists on trying to make peace with invaders. The enemy leader steps forward, draws their blade, and cuts the emperor’s hair themselves.
Hellen cuts her hair off and throws it in Cathy’s face at her son’s soccer scrimmage.
Procrastination Station 