Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Since school starts in a week, the school has sent its non-normalized list of equipment the urchins will need for school. One child’s list is very specialized in certain areas, the other’s is specialized and recommends specific brand names and sizes. So your shopping list has to be a half again as long as it should be.

Then I remembered something I’d read recently about Van Halen and brown M&Ms:

In case you weren’t around during the 80s, the rock supergroup Van Halen had a clause in their concert contracts that stipulated that the band would “be provided with one large bowl of M&M candies, with all brown candies removed”. Once the “M&Ms” story leaked to the press, social commentators jumped all over it as an egregious example of the pampered and spoiled behavior that rock artists demanded.

…

Van Halen was one of the first rock bands to bring truly massive concerts to mid-size cities like Macon, Georgia. The staff that worked at concert arenas in these smallish cities were used to bands coming to town with, at most, three tractor-trailers full of equipment. Van Halen’s equipment took up 9 tractor-trailers. It was a lot of stuff, and the staff at these venues were frequently overwhelmed. And when people are overwhelmed, they make mistakes. At a rock concert, “making a mistake” during setup has a large number of possible outcomes. Some mistakes don’t have any effect at all. Other mistakes can make the band sound awful, which hurts nothing but the band’s image. Other mistakes can cause stage lights to fall from the ceiling and kill people… which is exactly what the band was afraid of.

At the heart of any major concert is the contract. Much of the text of these contracts is standard legal boilerplate, but each band may attach specific demands via something called a “rider”. Most of the contracts involving concerts at large venues are jam-packed with riders, most of which involve technical details specific to the band’s stage design. For instance, a rider might say “Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, spaced evenly, providing nineteen amperes total, on beams suspended from the ceiling of the venue, which shall be able to support a total gross weight of 5,600 pounds each, and be suspended no less than 30 feet, but no more than 37.5 feet, above the stage surface”. Van Halen’s concert contracts would have several hundred such demands, and their contracts ended up (in lead singer David Lee Roth’s words) looking “like a Chinese Yellow Pages”.

The staff at venues in large cities were used to technically-complex shows like Van Halen’s. The band played in venues like New York’s Madison Square Garden or Atlanta’s The Omni without incident. But the band kept noticing errors (sometimes significant errors) in the stage setup in smaller cities. The band needed a way to know that their contract had been read fully. And this is where the “no brown M&Ms” came in. The band put a clause smack dab in the middle of the technical jargon of other riders: “Article 126: There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation”. That way, the band could simply enter the arena and look for a bowl of M&Ms in the backstage area. No brown M&Ms? Someone read the contract fully, so there were probably no major mistakes with the equipment. A bowl of M&Ms with the brown candies? No bowl of M&Ms at all? Stop everyone and check every single thing, because someone didn’t bother to read the contract.

And I thought, Holy cannoli! The teachers are testing me!

If the urchin’s backpack contains a 6oz bottle of Elmer’s Glue, a gel gluestick, or a 48-pack of crayons, this failure will automatically indicate to the teacher that I am that kind of parent. The kind who lets the child select camo-and-stripes ensembles with the trousers on backwards and two different shoes on the wrong feet.

So I was particularly meticulous in this annual scavenger hunt, finding the right size of disposable cups that are only sold in a dusty Halltown shop with a single shelf slot and two boxes stocked every two weeks.

Because I am that kind of parent, but I am considerate enough to not want to spoil the remainder of the teacher’s summer.

UPDATE: Thanks for the link, Mr. Sensing.

So I have this tech writing gig where I’m writing documentation for software that generates import/export documentation for exporters. The software now features the ability to produce documents for ITAR, which is the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. So on my technology Twitter Feed, I said:

Today’s user scenario: I am an international arms dealer. No, really.

A user scenario, as you know, is describes the mindset and goals of a user interacting with software.

Someone responded:

That’s good. Most of the software I work on is useless to you if you can’t get yourself some arms.

So I said:

Can I interest you in something on our menu? http://bit.ly/q6PkGl

The link goes to a list of codes used in shipping munitions overseas. Comparing this list provided by the United States Customs to the United States Munitions List, I discovered that the list was missing one of the munitions categories (even though the Customs data element spec says it should be available, but that’s government data integration for you). So I tweeted:

The Man is holding me down. I can’t sell Directed Energy Weapons abroad.

and:

I mean, the Pentagon’s selling its lightning gun on Ebay (http://t.co/xZTAwK7), and I can’t sell particle beams to the Mongolians.

I thought it was mighty funny. I just hope the Federal agents monitoring the social networks have a sense of humor, too.

A part of the new publicly funded Busch Stadium in St. Louis fell off of the six-year-old stadium:

A day after a 100-pound piece of metal trim toppled from Busch Stadium, inspectors were busy looking at similar panels on the stadium to determine if they could fall, too — and what to do about them.

Ron Watermon, the Cardinals’ director of public relations and civic affairs, said the city sent an inspector to the stadium late Monday afternoon after a 2-foot-by-4-foot piece fell from the building, and a team of inspectors was back at the stadium this morning.

Is it just me, or does it seem like more civic engineering projects are falling apart lately?

• June 2010, O’Donnell Park parking garage:
  

  Structural engineers from the City of Milwaukee, Milwaukee County and the State of Wisconsin will return to the collapsed parking garage Friday morning at O’Donnell Park.

  They will be there to determine why a portion of the garage on Lincoln Memorial Drive near the Summerfest grounds collapsed, killing a 15-year-old boy and injuring two others.

• August 1, 2007, I-35W:
  

  The I-35W Mississippi River bridge (officially known as Bridge 9340) was an eight-lane, steel truss arch bridge that carried Interstate 35W across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. During the evening rush hour on August 1, 2007, it suddenly collapsed, killing 13 people and injuring 145.

• July 2006, Big Dig tunnel:
  

  The Big Dig ceiling collapse occurred on July 10, 2006, when a concrete ceiling panel weighing 3 tons (2722 kg) and measuring 20 by 40 ft (6.1 by 12.2 m) fell in Boston’s Fort Point Channel Tunnel. The panel fell on a car traveling on the two-lane ramp connecting northbound I-93 to eastbound I-90 in South Boston, killing a passenger and injuring the driver.

The Romans built roads that were in use for millennia. 21st Century American Civilization can hardly seem to build something that lasts until the checks clear.

Yes, I know, Galloping Gertie, 1940. Have things always fallen down like this and I’m only being especially gloomy now?

I didn’t always used to be a talentless Internet blogging hack. Once, I was somebody. Once, I was a middle school student with a Kodak winner camera laden with 110 film. And I won prestigious awards. Or I won an award.

I won second place in the North Jefferson Middle School Art Show for that picture. It depicts my brother sleeping with his arm around our dog at the time, Cricket. Cricket lasted from those middle school years until the year after I graduated college. In other words, she was always there in the latter half of my childhood.

The picture was taken a year or so before the show; that bedroom is in the basement of my aunt’s house in St. Charles, where we lived for a year and a half after our mother moved us from Milwaukee to Misery, as we called it then.

Note the innovative wainscoting. My aunt bought a bunch of fence pickets and let them sun bleach for a while before putting them over the plastered basement walls.

Note the blonde-veneered bureau behind my brother. That had been part of my parents’ bedroom set in Wisconsin, pre-divorce. Aside from the dining room table and chairs, that bureau and its smaller dresser might have been the only matched furniture they owned. My mother let me have it when I moved out of her basement at age 25, so I still have that bureau in my bedroom today, with the scars from a puppy we would own a year after this photo was taken. My wife hates it, of course, and looks forward to a day when we own matched bedroom furniture. Last I saw, the matching dresser remained in the basement of my mother’s last house, laden with blankets and other clothes she bought at garage sales and probably never wore.

The yellow thing with a felt paw on my brother’s arm is a monkey puppet that my mother took to a bar once or twice when she got a chance to go out, post-divorce, in Milwaukee. When I turned nine or ten, I got one like it except brown, and I named it Mark. I think I disposed of Mark only a year or so back. In his 25 years, he lost an eye, his tongue, his nose, and had a tear in his abdomen.

The inverted smiley face is an orange pillow someone gave my brother. We never really liked it, but we carried it along and it was on the bed we shared in that basement.

At any rate, I had no real artistic talent, but I did have pictures from that Kodak camera to enter into the art show. And I won second place.

But as I’ve said before, when you look at old pictures from familiar environments, most memories are not stoked by the foreground but by the background.