Imponderables: Fun and Games (5 page)

U
ntil 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.

I
mponderables readers aren’t the only ones inter
ested 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:

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.

W
e 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:

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.

E
ven 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.

S
ome 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 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:

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, told
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.

Many smaller music labels are quite content to have retailers stock the shelves as soon as product is delivered. For every CD that is launched with radio advertising, an in-person plug on “Total Request Live” on MTV, and a concert tour, there are many more independent label releases with no marketing budget and no prayer of ever making the
Billboard
charts.

There is little doubt that uniform laydowns work. Even if a Tuesday release loses one day of tracking by SoundScan, Geoff Mayfield observes that at the date he last wrote to us, July 9, 2003,

By pointing all the marketing and advertising toward one day, free publicity can often be generated—the best recent example of this is not in music, but the book industry. When
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was released at midnight on June 21,
2003, the publisher, Scholastic, attempted with great success to make the launch a media event: five million books were sold on the first day, numbers that exceeded the opening day’s dollar grosses for the first two Harry Potter movies.

Most books are put on the shelves as soon as they are processed at the bookstore, as probably more than 95 percent of all book releases receive no marketing or advertising worth coordinating, but publishers will try to orchestrate the laydown of big books. We spoke to Mark Kohut, the national accounts manager at St. Martin’s Press, who said his publisher’s strategy is typical. St. Martin’s generally will try a uniform release date with titles that have a chance to hit one of the major best-seller lists (particularly the
New York Times
, but also
Publishers Weekly
,
Wall Street Journal
, and
USA Today lists),
generally titles with first printings of at least 100,000 copies. St. Martin’s releases its big titles on Tuesdays for exactly the same reason as the music labels. But the
New York Times measures sales from Sunday to
Saturday, so a Tuesday launch provides only five days of sales for the best-seller lists the first week. This might be the reason why Simon & Schuster chose a Monday laydown for Hillary Clinton’s memoirs, which reportedly sold more than half a million copies on its first day of release.

The big specialty chains (e.g., Barnes & Noble, FYE) and megastores (e.g., Wal-Mart, Costco) are scooping up a greater share of music and book sales. Many of these retailers provide gigantic discounts and much better store placement for best-sellers. As a result, the pressure on record labels and book publishers to create instant best-sellers is more intense than ever. Although the day of release is a small part of the equation, it’s a critical part.

Submitted by Allen Helm of Louisville, Kentucky.
Thanks also to Scott Padulsky of Roselle Park, New Jersey;
Christine Killius of Oakville, Ontario;
Dave Frederick of Newark, Delaware; and
Sam Bonham of Tellico Plains, Tennessee.