Back in high school a few kids would be tempted to insert a sentence such as "I bet you don't actually read all these papers" into an essay to see if the teacher caught it. I never tried it but the rumors were that some kids had got away with it. I just used it to worry less that my work was rushed and not very good, I told myself "the teacher will probably just be skimming this anyway; they don't have time to read all these papers in detail."
Aerosmith (e: Van Halen) banned brown M&Ms from their dressing room for shows and wouldn’t play if they were present. It was a sign that the venue hadn’t read the rider thoroughly and thus possibly an unsafe one (what else had they missed?)
> As lead singer David Lee Roth explained in a 2012 interview, the bowl of M&Ms was an indicator of whether the concert promoter had actually read the band's complicated contract. [1]
I wonder if they had to change that as the word leaked out. I can just see the promoter pointing out the bowl of M&Ms and then Roth saying "great, thank you, but the contract didn't say anything about M&Ms, now where is the bowl of tangerenes we asked for?"
To add to this, sometimes people would approach Van and ask about the brown M&Ms thing as soon as they received the contract. He would respond that the color wasn’t important, and he was glad they read the contract.
This reminds me of the tables-flipped version of this. A multiple choice test with 10 questions and a big paragraph of instructions at the top. In the middle of the instructions was a sentence: "skip all questions and start directly with question 10."
Question 10 was: "check 'yes' and put your pencil down, you are done with the test."
