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Random facts

SadisticPeppers

SadisticPeppers

eXtreme Business
I have a penchant for knowing random facts, and figured every so often, I'd post one up on here. So here we go:

Van Halen pioneered the modern contract rider where a band insisted on a list of demands from the venue, the most infamous of which was the request that a bowl of M&M's be placed in their dressing room with all the brown ones removed. One would think this was a rather asinine demand, but there was a method to their madness. Turns out, during their earlier tours, the band members noticed several venues cut some pretty big corners when it came to safety and proper electrical & mechanical work, which put not only their equipment, but the lives of the band members and their crew in danger. So they inserted the line about the bowl of M&M's to check whether the local venue was actually reading the contract and following its terms to the letter. If the bowl was there with all the brown M&M's removed, then the band could then safely assume that the other, perfectly legitimate, requests were being followed properly. If there were brown M&M's present or the bowl was missing altogether, the band would be within it's rights to have all the work described in the contract reviewed, done again, or personally inspected by the band members prior to them going on stage.

This last part has largely been forgotten, and has been co-opted by most other artists to simply demand things from the venues for the sake of them being celebrities.
 
Eddie and his brother have a reputation as real jerks, btw. Eddie is a mean drunk who has a had time getting along with people, and treats employees like dirt.

I met him and the band in Toronto and I have to say I wasn't impressed with any of them, accept Gary Cherone (previously of the band "Extreme"). He was nice enough to treat me like a human being, not a lowlife walking ticket sale.
 
Brings me back to the day of Wayne and Garth! I think I need to watch that again now that I think of it. Thanks for the tid bit Elcap!
 
elcap1999 said:
This last part has largely been forgotten, and has been co-opted by most other artists to simply demand things from the venues for the sake of them being celebrities.
Click to expand...

So was the M&M's! You believe the backstory? That's PR/damage control.

"Oh no! The brown M&M's are still there! This must mean the pyro was not loaded properly. We're doooooomed!"

:lol:
 
Here's another installment of random facts... This time, it's about Viggo Mortenson's part in Lord of the Rings:

Viggo suffered (or narrowly averted) several very real mishaps during the filming of the trilogy, all three of which eventually made it into the films.
  • In the scene where he, Legolas and Gimli are inspecting the funeral pyre for evidence of the hobbits, out of frustration, Viggo kicked a helmet, fracturing two toes in the process, and the resulting scream heard and him falling to his knees was his reaction to breaking his toes.
  • During the scene in the forest when the Fellowship first engaged the band of orcs, he nearly got hit in the face with a very real knife when the stunt actor not only misjudged the throw, he also threw it at Viggo with full force. Viggo just barely managed to bat it away with his sword at the last second. The clang you hear is not a sound effect, but the actual contact of his sword with the knife.
  • He got caught in an undertow while filming scene where he is drifting down the river, and because of the weight of the armor he had on, nearly drowned.
 
elcap1999 said:
Here's another installment of random facts... This time, it's about Viggo Mortenson's part in Lord of the Rings:

Viggo suffered (or narrowly averted) several very real mishaps during the filming of the trilogy, all three of which eventually made it into the films.
  • In the scene where he, Legolas and Gimli are inspecting the funeral pyre for evidence of the hobbits, out of frustration, Viggo kicked a helmet, fracturing two toes in the process, and the resulting scream heard and him falling to his knees was his reaction to breaking his toes.
  • During the scene in the forest when the Fellowship first engaged the band of orcs, he nearly got hit in the face with a very real knife when the stunt actor not only misjudged the throw, he also threw it at Viggo with full force. Viggo just barely managed to bat it away with his sword at the last second. The clang you hear is not a sound effect, but the actual contact of his sword with the knife.
  • He got caught in an undertow while filming scene where he is drifting down the river, and because of the weight of the armor he had on, nearly drowned.
Click to expand...

Coincedence alert: I just read this on Cracked.com today.

You left out perhaps the most interesting fact though - Vigo wasn't suppossed to play Aragorn - he was a last minute replacement.
 
Yes, Stuart Townsend was originally cast, but after a couple days, Peter Jackson cast Viggo instead because he wanted an older actor
 
Fun fact:
The "threshold" of a home exists because in the old days, dirt floors were covered with straw, or "thresh".

Thus a stick would be placed at the door to keep people leaving from kicking the straw out. Or, to hold in the thresh. A thresh-hold.

Another fun fact:
The expression "don't throw out the baby with the bathwater" has a literal origin. In the middle ages, bathing was done once a week or so. The natural order of bathing went like this - father/husband, the eldest male child, next eldest male child, wife/mother, oldest female, next oldest female, etc - and if there was a baby, they went last. As such by the time it came to bathing the baby or infant, the water was black with filth. So it is said that care had to be taken to avoid discarding the baby with the bathwater.


I love trivia - and used to have a thing for origins of expressions. The result is a fountain of useless information. lol

Another good one is "sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite!"

Well, we all now know from recent outbreaks that bedbugs are totally disgusting parasites. In the last they were far more common. And beds were string to bedposts with rope to keep them off the ground. With enough slack, the bed touched the ground and the bedbugs could get up into your business. But if the ropes were sufficiently tight, you were good, presumably because the bugs can't walk up a smooth surface like the bedposts.

So "sleep tight" is a reference to the tautness of the rope suspending the mattress.




Does anyone here ever go to The Straight Dope? Www.thestraightdope.com - awesome for this sort of thing. I think some of you would love it.
:cheers:
 
Here's another random fact for you guys & dolls:

Grace Hopper was one of the pioneers of modern computer science and has been credited with not only coining a number of terms commonly used among computer scientists and IT technicians alike, but developed standards, programming languages, and other items used today. For example, she coined the terms "computer bug" and "debugging". In the days when computers were built from vacuum tubes, one day, a moth found its way into one of the tubes of the computer being used by Hopper at a Department of Defense facility. She was a Naval Reservist that eventually attained the rank of Rear Admiral, and declared there was a "bug" in the system, and would have to "de-bug" it to get the computations she was running working again. The terms stuck.

She was also one of the first people to develop a compiler, in which a computer program is converted to the machine language that the CPU could understand and process, and was one of the founders of the COBOL computer language, as well as providing insight into what would eventually become FORTRAN. Before that, most computers were limited to doing mostly arithmatic, but even after showing their viability, most other computer scientists wouldn't give her the time of day for several years. She also advocated to the Department of Defense, that instead of a smaller number of large bulky computers, to instead use smaller, distributed computers, essentially the model of distributed computing we follow today. She was also instrumental in implementing standards in computer programming and computer hardware.
 
Funny you mention that... The powers that be were supposed to do a sequel to Master of the Universe, but after mangling the script, they renamed it Universal Soldier. The only common element between the two was that Dolph Lundgren was in both films...

Science random fact: Bismuth, long thought to be the heaviest stable element on the periodic table, is actually very slightly radioactive. Only in 2003 did scientists have radioactive detectors sufficiently sensitive to detect the radiation. They measured the radioactive half-life at over a billion times the current age of the Universe. Even with the radiation, it is still far less toxic to humans that almost other heavy metals, and is used as the primary ingredient in Pepto Bismol (hence the Bism- in Bismol), as well as cosmetics and as a lead replacement.
 
Random fact: There are areas of the Atacama desert in South America so dry and devoid of even bacterial life, they exceed the most stringent sterility requirements for a hospital operating room.
 
Science fact: Saturn's largest moon, Titan, would qualify as a planet if it were to orbit the Sun instead of Saturn. Also, it's atmosphere is thicker than Earth's, and is so cold, the "rain" is actually liquified natural gas. The drops average more than twice as large as the largest raindrop ever measured on Earth, and it also falls at about the same rate as a snowflake on Earth due to the moon's lower gravity.
 
Random historical fact: The mere sight of blood made Gen. Ulysses S. Grant physically ill. He even despised the mistreatment of animals (he was especially known for his love and care of horses), to the point where he once threatened to court martial a cavalry soldier for wanting to shoot his lame horse. He also refused to eat red meat until it was well-done to the point of almost being blackened because he didn't want to see any blood, and never ate any meat from birds. He also hated profanity, even reprimanding troops for telling off-color stories in his presence.
 
The Hot Pepper said:
So was the M&M's! You believe the backstory? That's PR/damage control.

"Oh no! The brown M&M's are still there! This must mean the pyro was not loaded properly. We're doooooomed!"

:lol:
Click to expand...

Of course this doesn't mean that they didn't destroy hotel rooms, or cause general shenanigans, outside of this. But it was legitimately part of their contract rider. I once ran three different Van Halen websites (VHFAQ.com, VHGuitar.com and VHTrading.com), and I was able to obtain photocopies of three different riders they had over the years. The "no brown M&M" clause was indeed in there.
 
Scott Roberts said:
Of course this doesn't mean that they didn't destroy hotel rooms, or cause general shenanigans, outside of this. But it was legitimately part of their contract rider. I once ran three different Van Halen websites (VHFAQ.com, VHGuitar.com and VHTrading.com), and I was able to obtain photocopies of three different riders they had over the years. The "no brown M&M" clause was indeed in there.
Click to expand...

Oh, I believe it was there, but not the story of it was to see if they were reading it. It was because they were rock stars.

This:

elcap1999 said:
So they inserted the line about the bowl of M&M's to check whether the local venue was actually reading the contract and following its terms to the letter. If the bowl was there with all the brown M&M's removed, then the band could then safely assume that the other, perfectly legitimate, requests were being followed properly. If there were brown M&M's present or the bowl was missing altogether, the band would be within it's rights to have all the work described in the contract reviewed, done again, or personally inspected by the band members prior to them going on stage.
Click to expand...

BS!
 
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