If you haven’t read about it before, the term comes from the band Van Halen, who demanded that there were no brown M&M’s backstage. People thought it was just a crazy rock star thing, but David Lee Roth later explained that it had a purpose:
Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine 18-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors—whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through.
… So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say, “Article 148: There will be 15 amperage voltage sockets at 20-foot spaces, evenly, providing 19 amperes … ” This kind of thing. And article number 126, in the middle of nowhere, was, “There will be no brown M&M’s in the backstage area, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation.”
So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl … well, line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem. Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.
My Brown M&M atm is AI-generated comments like this (first comment is referencing something like df = ... that they removed from the code, but left the comment, second comment is super useless):
# Assuming df is your DataFrame
# Show the plot
plt.show()
That probably means whoever I got the code from just copy/pasted whatever the LLM spit out, and didn’t actually think about the code at all.
What is a small detail that you pay attention to because it means there’s bigger issues to watch out for?
I say howdy to gauge people’s initial reaction when I first meet them. Their reaction to the corny and outdated term is telling about their mental picture of the world. It is the only time I use the word.
What do you feel like it tells you about them?
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You may have more in common with people from the south than you realize. I live in WNC where plenty of people use that word regularly. Folks in the mountains have widely varying knowledge bases and depth that they often don’t reveal right away. It might seem out of place in Southern California, but you may be shutting yourself off to the possibility that someone could surprise you and offer insight from a perspective you hadn’t considered.
Interesting litmus. Thanks for explaining. I hope it continues to serve you well.
Wow, as someone who says howdy to people all the time, I’m surprised you get any kind of reaction at all other than “hi” back.
Same. “Howdy!” is my standard greeting.
How y’all doin?
Same old. ‘boutchyew?
I say howdy at least a few times a day. 🤷🏻♂️
Howdy fellow Texan!
Nope. I just said it ironically enough times that it’s now an undeniable part of my vocabulary.
Be careful what you do ironically lest it become done ronically
A hoy hoy
I went through a cowboy phase as a kid, and this salutation is the only remnant. I don’t even think about it, it’s just how I’ve been greeting people for all my life.
I only really think about how it sounds when people chuckle or smile at it. It just sounds normal to me.
Let’s mosey.