Boneless chicken doesn't have to be, ruled Ohio's Supreme Court, siding against a diner who choked on a bone and sued the restaurant that served it. The court affirmed its earlier judgement that landed on the same absurd justification: "Boneless" refers not to the bones of the chicken but to a "cooking style." Birds tossed flapping and squawking into industrial shredders, voilà, boneless chicken a la Ohio.
The plaintiff asked the court for reconsideration and a ruling announced Monday handed back the same decision — but not without pointed dissent from Democrats and a citation of cleveland.com's Editorial Board.
Wrote Democratic Justice Michael P. Donnelly: "If the public cannot trust the judiciary to be faithful in small things — like whether 'boneless' can reasonably be understood as not including bones — how can the judiciary be trusted with greater things?"
You can appreciate this as an absurd illustration of what courts are good for. You can't really know for sure what drives the thinking—ideology? corruption? lead poisoning?—though the party-line nature of the 4-3 verdict seems like a hint. What you can do is free yourself from whatever constraints trust or hope ever placed upon you and (to borrow one of the legal system's inane sacraments) govern yourself accordingly.
Another way of putting it: if the chicken is bad, everything is bad.
The [Van Halen] contract rider [concerned] so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function. So just as a little test, in the technical aspect of the rider, it would say "Article 148: There will be fifteen amperage voltage sockets at twenty-foot spaces, evenly, providing nineteen 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.
