Question: Why is it so much fun to sing in the shower?
Answer: If you had to make a list of where you do most of your singing, the shower would probably be near the top, along with the car, church, dark forests where monsters might be hiding and you can't betray any fear, and grassy alpine meadows where the hills are alive with the sound of music.
(Curious fact: no one sings on a toilet. Though some men are known to hum nervously at a urinal.)
We spoke to Lewis Lipnick, an acoustics consultant who is also a bassoonist with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center in Washington. Lipnick, a shower singer himself, explains that a shower stall is a "reverberant space."
"People like to get feedback. When you're in a very reverberant space, it amplifies certain frequencies of your voice. It amplifies the lower side of your voice," he said.
It's not simply that showers and tubs are surrounded by tile. What's more important is that the walls are close together and parallel. A square or rectangular space allows for sound waves to bounce back and forth and achieve what Lipnick calls a "standing wave," basically an amplification of the sound at certain wavelengths.
Something about the wave-lengths of low notes (the crests of the sound waves are farther apart) makes them more easily accentuated by a small resonant chamber. Thus when you sing in the shower you have a fuller effect, and don't realize your voice is actually a thin, squealing, nasal catastrophe.
Moreover - and this is our theory - the spattering of the shower water washes out many of the higher frequencies in your voice. The higher pitches are literally drowned by the shower noise. So you register the deeper, lower frequencies, and you think you sound like a professional opera singer.
And finally, naturally, inevitably, we have the psychological factor. Normally you have a thing called shame. It is what prevents you from bursting into song on the subway, unless you are Mickey Rooney or something. But in the shower, you're in a bubble of privacy.
You cannot hear the outside world, cannot see it (because of the curtain), cannot smell it or detect it in any way. This triggers a spasm of solipsism, in which you forget to worry about whether other people in the house or neighbors can hear your pathetic crooning.
By the way, if you want to try something really different: Next time you get in the shower, perform an instrumental version.
Question: Why does the actual cost of a long-distance call seem to have no correlation to how far you're calling?
Answer: If the world made any sense at all, the way you'd calculate the price of a long-distance call is by looking at a map. It'd be cheaper to call someone close than someone far away. You could do the calculation with a ruler.
But instead the world is beset by "market forces," which, in combination with "regulatory agencies," ensure that it might cost more to call a friend a couple of counties away than one on the other side of the continent.
Phone calls are like air fares: Distance has little to do with the price. As a general rule the call will cost as much as the market permits. With competition in the long-distance industry, companies don't charge much for popular routes.
The amazing thing is that any individual phone call has virtually no technological cost. It's not like it takes a big jolt of power. Operators no longer handle the switching; it's all computerized.
Of course the long-distance companies have all the upfront costs of building the network, and salaries to pay and so on. But what the long-distance companies grumble about is that they have to pay access fees to local phone companies. It's information superhighway robbery.
For example, you might pay AT&T something like 16 cents a minute to make a call from the East Coast to the West Coast. But AT&T has to turn around immediately and pay about 3.5 cents per minute to Bell Atlantic to pick up that phone call, and then another 3.5 cents to Pacific Bell for dropping off the call.
The access fees can sometimes be even higher for a relatively short call within a state, because a different set of regulations applies to intrastate calls. And rural phone companies sometimes charge through the nose for long-distance access. That's why calling someone out in the boondocks not too far away can be more expensive than calling New York City.
That's also why the phone business is going to get even more complicated. New laws are expected to open up the local phone business to competition. AT&T and its ilk think that will stop the local and regional companies from gouging the long-distance companies with access fees.
Our idea is that people should charge access fees in exchange for being willing to talk to anyone, anywhere. For party banter, for example, you should charge no less than 7 cents a minute. Reading a storybook to a small child is 11 cents a minute. Laughing at someone's joke is easily worth 25 cents a minute. No pay, no hah-hah.
The Mailbag:
Dave Barry of Miami says he is a frequent user of hotel toilets, and he asks, "Why don't they have paper strips on toilets anymore saying `Sanitized For Your Protection'?"
Dear Dave: You might want to sit down for this.
Although the toilet strips still exist, in the fancier places they are now frowned on because people don't want to know that someone else has been camped out on the toilet. They want to pretend they're at home. The strips are too suggestive of germy places like hospitals, prisons and junior high schools.
"We want our guests to feel like they're at home, not like they're in an institution of some sort," says Andrew Manganiello, director of housekeeping at the Washington Hilton and Towers.
The Why staff, by the way, insists on using those strips at home.