Imponderables: Fun and Games Read online

  One of the main strategies for keeping us tuned in longer is to promote what is coming up next. As Danny Wright puts it,

  Never talk about last night or a movie you saw last week or what you just played. Billboard the next few tunes and events to keep listeners sticking around.

  PDs employing this strategy often frontsell. Before a commercial break, a jock might say, “Coming up, the new Eric Clapton, Whitney Houston, and an oldie by the Beatles.” The hope is that the listener will stay glued to the station if she likes one or more of the songs.

  Of course this strategy can backfire too. If a listener would rather hear fingernails on a blackboard than Whitney Houston, he may desert the station, even if he was mildly curious about the identity of the Beatles oldie.

  Many of the “more music, less talk” stations feature “music sweeps,” in which five or more songs are played in a row without commercial interruption. Frontselling eight songs at a time is tedious, and backselling is deadly. Some stations solve the problem by frontselling only one or two songs and doing the same on the back end. Some feature what Al Brock calls “segue assists,” in which the jock IDs the song before or after every record.

  6. Selling records isn’t a radio station’s job. We spoke to several radio programmers who echoed this sentiment. The trade association of the recording industry, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), launched a campaign to promote IDs, plastering stickers on DJ record copies saying, “When You Play It, Say It,” the “It” meaning title and artist. In 1988, the RIAA released a study of over one thousand radio listeners, between the ages of twelve and forty-nine, indicating that about two thirds of the respondents would like more information about the records they heard on radio. Listeners between twenty-five and forty-nine years old were particularly vehement, and several programmers we spoke to revealed that the lack of IDs has surpassed “too much talk, not enough music” as the number one complaint of listeners.

  Increasingly, radio stations are conducting “outcall” research, telephoning listeners and asking them about their musical preferences. This type of research is of little value if respondents don’t know the titles and artists of the songs played on the stations. One PD we consulted, who wished to remain anonymous, indicated that his policy of heavy backselling had nothing to do with helping record companies:

  We try to backsell as much as possible for two reasons. First, it answers the listeners’ primary question: What was that we just heard? Second, it helps us with our research. How are we supposed to ask listeners to call in our request line if they don’t know what they’ve heard on our station?

  Consultant Steve Warren suggests that there are alternate ways of supplying listeners with information about titles and artists, including manned request lines and listener hotlines (in which an employee answers questions about the music, the station, contests, etc.). Warren indicated that at times it doesn’t hurt to have calls come in directly to the DJ—it’s a good way for jocks to stay in touch with their fans.

  Disc jockeys have so many chores to perform besides listening to music that many are understandably not excited about IDs; after all, their time on the air is extremely limited. So, we guess we can’t be too hard on our very Human Numan for not frontselling or backselling every song. After all, he estimates that on his average three-hour shift, he speaks on-air for a grand total of seven minutes.

  Submitted by the guy in the shower, New York, New York.

  Postscript:

  Since this chapter was written, Human Numan has left terrestrial radio for the less rigid format of Sirius Satellite Radio.

  WHY IS THE HOME PLATE IN BASEBALL SUCH A WEIRD SHAPE?

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  Until 1900, home plate was square like all the other bases. But in 1900, the current five-sided plate was introduced to aid umpires in calling balls and strikes. Umpires found it easier to spot the location of the ball when the plate was elongated. If you ask most players, it hasn’t helped much.

  Submitted by Bill Lachapell of Trenton, Michigan.

  Thanks also to Michael Gempe of Elmhurst, Illinois, and

  John H. McElroy of Haines City, Florida.

  HOW DO FIGURE SKATERS KEEP FROM GETTING DIZZY WHILE SPINNING? IS IT POSSIBLE TO EYE A FIXED POINT WHILE SPINNING SO FAST?

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  Imponderables readers aren’t the only ones interested in this question. So are astronauts, who suffer from motion sickness in space. We consulted Carole Shulman, executive director of the Professional Skaters Guild of America, who explained:

  Tests were conducted by NASA several years ago to determine the answer to this very question. Research proved that with a trained skater, the pupils of the eyes do not gyrate back and forth during a spin as they do with an untrained skater. The rapid movement of the eyes catching objects within view is what actually causes dizziness.

  The eyes of a trained skater do not focus on a fixed point during a spin but rather they remain in a stabilized position focusing on space between the skater and the next closest object. This gaze is much like that of a daydream.

  So how are skaters taught to avoid focusing on objects or people in an arena? Claire O’Neill Dillie, skating coach and motivational consultant, teaches students to see a “blurred constant,” an imaginary line running around the rink. The imaginary line may be in the seats or along the barrier of the rink (during layback spins, the imaginary line might be on the ceiling). The crucial consideration is that the skater feels centered. Even when the hands and legs are flailing about, the skater should feel as if his or her shoulders, hips, and head are aligned.

  Untrained skaters often feel dizziest not in the middle of the spin but when stopping (the same phenomenon experienced when a tortuous amusement park ride stops and we walk off to less than solid footing). Dillie teaches her students to avoid vertigo by turning their heads in the opposite direction of the spin when stopping.

  What surprised us about the answers to this Imponderable is that the strategies used to avoid dizziness are diametrically opposed to those used by ballet dancers, who use a technique called “spotting.” Dancers consciously pick out a location or object to focus upon; during each revolution, they center themselves by spotting that object or location. When spotting, dancers turn their head at the very last moment, trailing the movement of the body, whereas skaters keep their head aligned with the rest of their body.

  Why won’t spotting work for skaters? For the answer, we consulted Ronnie Robertson, an Olympic medalist who has attained a rare distinction: Nobody has ever spun faster on ice than him.

  How fast? At his peak, Robertson’s spins were as fast as six revolutions per second. He explained to us that spotting simply can’t work for skaters because they are spinning too fast to focus visually on anything. At best, skaters are capable of seeing only the “blurred constant” to which Claire O’Neill Dillie was referring, which is as much a mental as a visual feat.

  Robertson, trained by Gustav Lussi, considered to be the greatest spin coach of all time, was taught to spin with his eyes closed. And so he did. Robertson feels that spinning without vertigo is an act of mental suppression, blocking out the visual cues and rapid movement that can convince your body to feel dizzy.

  Robertson explains that the edge of the blade on the ice is so small that a skater’s spin is about the closest thing to spinning on a vertical point as humans can do. When his body was aligned properly, Robertson says that he felt calm while spinning at his fastest, just as a top is most stable when attaining its highest speeds.

  While we had the greatest spinner of all time on the phone, we couldn’t resist asking him a related Imponderable: Why do almost all skating routines, in competitions and skating shows and exhibitions, end with long and fast scratch spins? Until we researched this Imponderable, we had always assumed that the practice started because skaters would have been too dizzy to continue doing anything else after rotating so fast. But Robertson pooh-poohed our theory.

  The importance
of the spin, to Robertson, is that unlike other spectacular skating moves, spins are sustainable. While triple jumps evoke oohs and aahs from the audience, a skater wants a spirited, prolonged reaction to the finale of his or her program. Spins are ideal because they start slowly and eventually build to a climax so fast that it cannot be appreciated without the aid of slow-motion photography.

  Robertson believes that the audience remembers the ending, not the beginning, of programs. If a skater can pry a rousing standing ovation out of an audience, perhaps supposedly sober judges might be influenced by the reaction.

  Robertson’s trademark was not only a blindingly fast spin but a noteworthy ending. He used his free foot to stop his final spin instantly at the fastest point. Presumably, when he stopped, he opened his eyes to soak in the appreciation of the audience.

  Submitted by Barbara Harris Polomé of Austin, Texas.

  Thanks also to David McConnaughey of Cary, North Carolina.

  WHAT IS THE EMBLEM ON THE PITTSBURGH STEELERS’ HELMETS? AND IS THERE ANY PARTICULAR REASON WHY THE PITTSBURGH STEELERS ARE THE ONLY NFL TEAM TO HAVE THEIR LOGO ON ONLY ONE SIDE OF THEIR HELMETS?

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  We thought this Imponderable might be a little obscure to include here, but when we found out that the Pittsburgh Steelers public relations department developed a form letter expressly to answer it, we realized that football fans must be burning to know all about the Steelers’ helmet emblem. So here’s the form letter:

  The emblem, called a steelmark, was adopted in 1963 and is the symbol of the Iron and Steel Institute. There is not a special reason as to why the emblem is only on the right side. That is the way the logo was originally applied to the helmet, and it has never been changed.

  So many NFL teams redo their helmet design at the drop of a hat, so to speak, that our guess is that in 1963, the Steelers were not alone in their single-sided emblem configuration.

  Submitted by Sue Makowski of Depew, New York.

  Thanks also to Thomas Ciampaglia of Lyndhurst, New York.

  ON JEOPARDY! WHAT IS THE DIFFICULTY LEVEL OF THE DAILY DOUBLES SUPPOSED TO BE?

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  Even devout watchers of Jeopardy! are unlikely to know the answer to this Imponderable. We watch contestants risking $3000 or conservatively wagering only $400 that they can construct the right question to “answer” a daily-double answer correctly. But do they know how difficult the question is going to be?

  If a daily double appears behind a $1000 answer, does this mean that the daily double will have the same difficulty as the $1000 answer it replaces? Or are daily doubles more difficult? Or do they vary from answer to answer?

  According to Alex Trebek, host and producer of Jeopardy!, a daily-double answer is exactly the same level of difficulty as the answer that would appear without the daily double. In fact, the staff does not even compose separate answers for daily doubles.

  Although the categories under which daily doubles appear are randomly selected, faithful viewers of the show can attest to the fact that daily doubles tend to be placed in the middle range of difficulty, rarely instead of the easiest or hardest answer. In the early days of Jeopardy!, contestants tended to select the easiest answers first and then move down the board neatly in ascending order of difficulty (and prize money). This worked well from the producers’ point of view, since games could swing dramatically toward the end of Double Jeopardy, when more prize money was being gambled. Placing the daily double in the middle of the board helped guarantee that contestants wouldn’t select it early in the game, when its appearance has a less dramatic effect on the result.

  Increasingly, contestants on Jeopardy!, are more rebellious. They have taken to selecting the most difficult answers first, which makes some sense, since it assures them the opportunity to go for the largest amount of money. Usually, time elapses before all the answers can be tried—and the leftovers, from the players’ standpoint, might as well be the cheap answers. Some players are being so unsymmetrical as to start in the middle of categories and work back and forward. This seems to noticeably upset Alex Trebek. He feels it is poor strategy, since contestants are thrown difficult answers before they understand the context of the categories—not all of which are totally obvious. It might also upset Trebek that the varying pattern of answer selection by contestants makes it harder to ensure that daily doubles, the wild cards of Jeopardy!, will be selected toward the end of each round, when they will presumably help to keep viewers pinned to their seats until the end of Final Jeopardy.

  WHY ARE NEW CDS RELEASED ON TUESDAYS? WHY AREN’T NEW BOOKS RELEASED ON A PARTICULAR DAY?

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  Some things you can count on. Movies are released on Fridays. Diets start on Mondays. CDs are released on Tuesdays.

  The Friday release of movies makes sense. A sizable majority of filmgoing occurs on the weekend, and studios can point toward a huge opening weekend by coordinating advertising and talk-show appearances by stars during the week. One of the reasons why Thursday night has become a battleground for young-skewing shows on the television networks is that movie studios spend huge bucks advertising their new films on that night to maximize attendance on the first weekend. The TV networks want to extract higher fees for those ads, which are based on the number of eyeballs tuning in.

  Diets on Monday? The perfect time to work off the pounds you gained overindulging in food (tubs of popcorn at the movies?) and drink over the weekend. And self-sacrifice might as well coincide with the beginning of the dreaded school- or workweek.

  But Tuesday seems like a colorless choice to launch new music (and videotapes and DVDs), especially when traffic in stores is highest on the weekends. Why was it picked? We had a theory, which was that the change occurred so that new releases would be given seven full days of sales history in order to attain the highest position possible on the Billboard charts, the bible of the music industry. But no less than the director of charts for Billboard, Geoff Mayfield, fingers another source:

  The culprit was not our charts, but the UPS man. As more and more chain stores received their new-release shipments directly from the labels’ distributors, rather than from chain headquarters, stores at the end of a delivery route were at a competitive disadvantage to those which received their product earlier in the day on the dates when important titles came to market.

  The uneven pattern of distribution occurred because UPS and other delivery services didn’t provide service on Sunday, and the big chains were leaning on distributors to get new product as early as possible on Monday. All things being equal, the record labels would prefer a Monday launch, as Nielsen SoundScan, the company that measures record sales that form the basis of the Billboard charts, tracks sales from Monday through Sunday.

  But four different sources, independently, used the expression “even playing field” to describe the relative fairness of Tuesdays for laying down new releases, and Tuesday seems to hit the “sweet spot” of providing maximum time for new recordings to hit the charts while satisfying the demands of retailers. Jim Parham, of Jive Records, elaborates:

  Most independent music stores buy from wholesalers called one-stops. The extra day, Monday, allows these wholesalers to ship to these accounts for the product to arrive on street date [i.e., Tuesday] or only one day prior. If street date were on a Monday, these stores would have to have the product delivered on the Friday before street date. When this happens, the label loses control of the release date, especially on stores not honoring street dates and selling the product early. This creates a chain reaction and you can lose a significant amount of sales that will not count toward the first-week chart position, as SoundScan sales are measured from Monday to Sunday.

  Parham observes that the “street date” issue isn’t as intense as it once was, as chain stores now dominate the market, and they tend to “jump the gun” less frequently than independents.

  A uniform street date has other advantages. A source at Rhino Records, who preferred to remain anonymous, to
ld Imponderables that the Tuesday street date allowed the production people at the label to set up systems that culminate in shipments every Friday that should hit the stores on Mondays. If there are delivery problems, a Tuesday launch schedule allows stores to resolve the issues on Monday. And letting consumers know that Tuesday is the day when new CDs are released is a way to drive traffic to retail stores during the week, according to Susan L’Ecoyer, director of communications at the National Association of Recording Merchandisers.

  It must be tempting for stores to break the embargo and sell CDs that are lying around the stockroom. We were surprised to learn that the uniform laydown date is usually just a “gentleman’s agreement.” As Fred Bronson, Billboard’s “Chartbeat” columnist, told us, “I suppose if someone broke it consistently, suppliers could refuse to sell him any more records, which might be reason enough not to break the agreement.” In practice, we couldn’t find any evidence that any but a few scattered independent retailers were ever punished for selling product prematurely.