How Does Aspirin Find a Headache?

by David Feldman

  So there’s the answer: The soil is offended by you calling it dirt, Loren, and has flown the scene of your crime against it.

  We promised Grant and Hole we would treat soil with all the respect it was due, and temporarily suppress the use of the “d” word, if they would answer our question. They provided several explanations for why you might run out of soil when refilling a hole:

  1. Not saving all the soil. Dr. Hole reported one instance, where in their excitement about their work, a team of soil scientists forgot to lay down the traditional canvas to collect the collected soil: “We had lost a lot of the soil the forest floor, among dead branches and leaves.”

  2. You changed the soil structure when you dug up the dirt. Grant explains:

  Soil is composed of organic and inorganic material as well as air spaces and microorganisms. Soil has a structure which includes, among other things, pores (or air spaces) through which water and plant roots pass. Within the soil are worm, mole, and other tunnels and/or air space. All of this structure is destroyed during the digging process.

  Hole confirms that stomping on the hole you are refilling can also compact the soil, removing pores and openings, resulting in plugging the hole too tight:

  It sounds like a case of poor surgery to me. You treated the patient (the soil) badly by pounding the wound that you made in the first place.

  3. Soil often dries during the digging/handing/moving Grant reports that the water in soil sometimes causes the soil to take up more space than it does when dry.

  Both of our experts stressed that the scenario outlined by our correspondent is not always true. Sometimes, you may have leftover soil after refilling, as Dr. Hole explains:

  It is risky to say that “you never have enough soil to refill.” Because sometimes you have too much soil. If you saved all your diggings on a canvas and put it all back, there could be so much soil hat it would mound up, looking like a brown morning coffee cake where the hole had been.

  …you loosened the soil a lot when you dug it out. When you put the soil back, there were lots of gaps and pore spaces that weren’t there before. It might take a year for the soil to settle back into its former state of togetherness. A steady, light rain might speed the process a little bit.

  Submitted by Loren A. Larson of Orlando, Florida.

  Why Was Twenty-one Chosen as the Age of Majority?

  Has there ever existed a teenager who has not wailed, loudly and frequently, “Why do I have to wait until I’m twenty-one until I can (fill in the black)?” To a kid with raging hormones, the number seems totally arbitrary.

  And of course, the age is arbitrary. Now that some states have lowered the drinking age to eighteen (“If we are old enough to fight in Vietnam, we’re old enough to vote and drink ourselves silly,” went the argument), the number twenty-one seems downright capricious. How did this tradition begin?

  Michael de L. Landon, professor of history at the University of Mississippi, provided us with the proper ammunition to blame the appropriate party: the British.

  Of course, twenty-one is approximately the age when both young men and women complete their full physical growth. More specifically, in medieval times in western Europe, young men of noble and knightly families normally left their homes to enter into service in the household of someone of equal or higher rank (as compared to their parents) around the age of nine to eleven. Until fourteen, they served as pages, mostly under the supervision of the ladies of the household. From fourteen to twenty-one, they served as (e)squires attached to adult knights who, in return for having their horses attended to, their armor polished, etc., were supposed to train them in the knightly arts.

  By the thirteenth century, twenty-one was customary age for a young man to be knighted. Likewise, among middle-class families in the towns and cities, a boy would normally be apprenticed at adolescence (i.e., around fourteen) to a “master” to learn a trade or craft. The customary apprenticeship period was seven years, until the age of twenty-one.

  We wonder whether today’s teenagers would exchange the right to drink at an earlier age for the right to leave home and work for up to twelve years before the age of twenty-one.

  The English age of majority was by no means universal, even in Europe. Professor de L. Landon points out that in Roman law, children were “infants” until the age of seven; “pupils” until the age of puberty (girls, twelve; boys, fourteen); and minors until marriage for girls or age twenty-five for boys.

  Submitted by Scott Wallace of Marion, Iowa. Thanks also to John Anthony Anella of South Bend, Indiana; and Joey Maraia of Nacogdoches, Texas.

  Why Don’t Disc Jockeys Identify the Titles and Artists of the Songs They Play?

  We have a nifty secret for curing the morning blahs—sleep through them. Yes, we admit it: We’re night people. We sleep until noon, run the shower, and flip the radio on to WHTZ, better known as Z100 in the New York City metropolitan area, and listen to the midday jock, Human Numan. Z100 is what the radio trade calls a CHR (Contemporary Hits Radio) station, a modern mutation of the old Top 40 format. Z100 has a small playlist of current songs.

  Human’s a terrific disc jockey. He’s not full of himself. Doesn’t reach for laughs. But we have one big complaint: He rarely, if ever, identifies songs. As we’re writing this chapter, we’ve heard the new New Order single played at least twenty-five times on his show but have yet to hear the title identified.

  Fate threw us into Human’s lap one day, and we got to talk to him about this Imponderable. DJs have two options in identifying a song: introducing it before they play it, or “frontselling”; or playing the song and announcing the name of the recording artist and/or song afterward, or “backselling.” The first thing that Human wanted to let Imponderables readers know is that the vast majority of DJs, especially in major urban markets, have little artistic control over what they play and what they say on the air. In a letter, Human discussed the pressures and constraints of a DJ in his kind of format and used a fifteen-minute segment of his show to demonstrate:

  Think of the DJs in the Top 100 markets as actors or football players. The coach designs the plays and the playwright gives the actor his lines: It’s the same for the American DJ.

  The program director (PD) is the second most powerful person at a radio station, behind the general manager (GM). The PD hires the DJs and has the power to fire them, promote them, and has complete control over their shows.

  The PD creates a structure for the DJ’s show called a format clock. This is a paper clock that has no hour hand because it is used every hour. On this clock, for example, it says where the one is: SEGUE, to proceed without pause (radio language for “shut up, just play the next song”). A DJ can never talk where the PD has indicated SEGUE on his routine clock.

  Then between the 1 and 2 on the clock, somewhere about seven minutes past the top of the hour, the PD might indicate LINER. This element means that the DJ has been given a 3 “by 5” card with the “lines” he should ad lib or read verbatim, depending upon how strict the PD is. The LINER is a very important sell, one that the station must convey without any DJ clutter. The liner should not be diffused with additional information, such as a backsell of the previous record.

  The next element marked on the clock, at perhaps twelve minutes past, might say “BACKSELL/FRONTSELL NEW MUSIC—OPEN SET.” This element indicates that every hour at this point, the third or fourth record in the hour will be a brand new song that the PD wants to identify to the listener. Aha! The DJ may now ID the song. But notice he or she may ID only when indicated by the clock. Here my format clock also said “OPEN SET.” This is the time when a DJ is free to express himself or herself(as long as the DJ remembered to sell the NEW MUSIC in this case!).

  I’m just the tailback running up the left side, running a play the coach has called. I try to put my own spin on it, and dodge the tackles, but it is somebody on the sidelines calling the play.

  PDs love to use a private Batphone setup in virtually every stu
dio in every radio station. It’s called the HOTLINE. If you don’t follow the format, guess who’s calling?

  So if it’s the PD calling the shots, why don’t PDs instruct DJs to identify more songs? We talked to scores of disc jockeys and PDs and found absolutely no consensus about the wisdom of frequent song identification. Here are some of the most important reasons for lack of IDs, followed by the rebuttal case for more IDs.

  1. Research shows that listeners want more music and less talk. Jay Gilbert, afternoon drive DJ on WEBN, Cincinnati, one of the first Album-Oriented Rock stations, told us that every research survey he has ever seen has indicated that most listeners want DJs to shut up and play more music. Originally, the relative lack of commercials and DJ chatter of FM helped the fledgling band win over AM listeners.

  Sure, says Cleveland radio personality Danny Wright, who is generally against overdoing IDs, every poll he has seen in his twenty years in broadcasting indicates that listeners hate jocks who talk too much. But then who are the most popular people on the air? According to Wright, “the folks with the oral trots”—Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern, Rick Dees, Scott Shannon, etc. Wright believes that if a jock has nothing to say, he is better off just playing music, but that audiences love patter if it is entertaining.

  2. IDs slow down the show. In order to speed up the pace of the show and to provide the illusion of more music being played, stations will do everything from playing records at a higher than normal speed to instructing DJs to talk over the music. To many PDs, back announcing, in particular, is just dead air, particularly when the time could be devoted to more jingles promoting the call letters of the station.

  Of course, the five or ten seconds devoted to identifying a song could be spent playing more music, but then perhaps a radio show should be more than a jukebox with commercials. Al Brock, a PD and on-air personality at WKLX, an oldies station in Rochester, New York, told Imponderables that identifying a song is a way of connecting the DJs with the music, showing listeners that the jocks are interested in and committed to the music. PDs who are for frequent IDs see them as part of the music programming, while anti-ID PDs see them as part of the talk. Brock feels strongly enough about the issue to try to frontsell or backsell every song on the station (which can’t always be done, because of time constraints).

  3. Why tell audiences what they already know? A classical music station usually IDs every selection it plays, because the audience might not be able to recognize a particular piece or the conductor and orchestra. But does a DJ really have to tell an audience “That was Whitney Houston and ‘I will Always Love You’?”

  The answer of the pro-ID side is, “Yes, you do.” Al Brock informed us that most people know some songs by titles and other by artists but that few can remember both. For example, after the Righteous Brothers’ “Unchained Melody” was rereleased during the popular run of the movie Ghost, the song was not only played on oldies stations (it never stopped being played there) but promoted as if it were a new song on many CHR and AC (Adult Contemporary) stations. Yet listeners constantly called to ask the name of the song or the group who sang it. Another DJ told us that every time he plays Paul Stookey’s “The Wedding Song” (the title is not part of the lyrics), even if he front-or backsells it, he gets calls asking, “What song was that?”

  Obviously, the need for IDs depends upon the format of the station and the familiarity of a given song. Virtually every PD and DJ we spoke to identified a brand new song, one that the station has been playing for two to four weeks. (These songs are called “currents.”) All agreed that the songs least needed to be ID’d are songs that are no longer current but are still popular and haven’t left the playlist. These are known as “recurrents” and are usually played less than “currents” but more than oldies. Some PDs argue that oldies don’t require IDs because they are so familiar, but even this strategy has pitfalls, for oldies stations are trying to attract younger listeners, including people who might not have been alive when a song was recorded.

  4. IDs create clutter. An old broadcasting bromide is that each music set on a radio show should stress one thought. Considering that there are many elements in a radio show—music, talk, promos, ads, weather, contests, jingles—IDs can cause more confusion than enlightenment. Steve Warren, a veteran New York radio personality now heading his own programming consulting company, MOR Media, reminded us that for most of the audience, radio is a secondary medium. Most listeners are doing other things, such as driving cars, sewing, or taking a shower, while listening to the radio. Overloading any format with too much information can backfire.

  Even pro-ID programmers realize that, for example, during morning drive shows, when information about weather and traffic may be paramount and commercials are most frequent, backselling may not be prudent. They often fine-tune their volume of ID’s by daypart.

  5. IDs slow the momentum of the show. One of the tenets of CHR radio is “always move forward.” The name of the ratings game in radio is to keep listeners as long as possible. Unlike television, where viewers generally have some loyalty to particular shows and are likely to stick with them for the half-hour or hour, PDs are acutely aware that listeners in automobiles have push-buttons that can “eject” their station the moment they hear an unwanted song or one too many commercials. This is one reason why many stations start a new song before the DJ talks over it—subliminally, this tells the listener, “Don’t worry, there is no advertisement coming up.”

  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 l
isteners 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 indirectly 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.