I was recently shamed into watching TV by a friend of mine. Since he doesn't have TiVo, we had to watch TV "with extra crap on top, please, hold the mayo." I hate people that say hold the mayo. Mayonnaise is the greatest thing ever, and specifically requesting its absence makes you deserving of having a telephone booth slammed into your face by a sudden gust of mayo-sympathetic wind. The only thing worse than that are the people that take the sandwich back and say "excuse me, I didn't want mayonnaise." They deserve to be eaten alive by electric eels in a vat of rancid meat. But I digress.
There was a new commercial on TV (or at least, new in the sense that I hadn't seen it in the last 2 minutes of TV, which was all I'd watched recently)...perhaps you've seen it. It's for Gatorade's new "fitness water." I thought that that was just Gatorade, but apparently now they think they've come up with a better recipe for water than "Take hydrogen. Add oxygen. Mix well." The concept is completely ludicrous, as is the concept of bottled water. The only reason anybody should ever buy bottled water is so they get a clean bottle that they can refill with water later.
Apparently, Gatorade's genius marketing experts (read: trained monkeys) have calculated that the company has been losing market share (read: CEO can only buy 8 houses per fiscal quarter) to their biggest competitor: water. Apparently, some people don't want the extra couple of calories in their water (probably those stupid calorie-counting psychos that don't want mayonnaise). Obviously, they only had one solution:
But unfortunately, Hellman's backed out of the deal just before they signed, leaving Gatorade with no alternative than to confront mother nature on her own front, and introduce a sinister new competitive product: WATER.
I had pieced all of this together by the first 10 seconds or so of the commercial, which pictures what was probably somebody's creepy dream or else an acid trip that has had all of the extra colors edited out. When the commercial was almost over though, and my mind was just starting to wander away from this boring piece of propaganda they were showing me, I heard them say something that had every scientist, naturalist, water-drinker, and logical thinker spinning in their graves (even the ones that weren't dead yet): "...with flavor to hydrate..."
WHAT? Flavor to hydrate? Since when does flavor hydrate anything? Maybe, just maybe, Gatorade's brilliant marketing writers (of the last three words, pick any one) know something I don't. Then again, maybe they don't speak English. So to be sure, we're gonna have to delve into some etymology. Hopefully then we can sort all of this out. The word "hydrate" could have one of several roots. It could come from the root "hydra" which is a multi-headed beast that breathes fire. Since this bears a remarkable resemblance to any marketing department, you might be tempted to think that this is the correct root. However, I think that the root word that we're looking for is "hydro" which, roughly speaking, means water. I mean, think about it for a while...when you say you're "dehydrated" do you mean "without a marketing department" or "out of water?" Most of you probably know the answer, but those of you that are in marketing are probably throwing rocks at people and thinking "me hungry." Either way, I'm right. Hydrate = something water-related.
So if hydration has something to do with water, then what does it have to do with flavor? Hmm...well maybe the flavor could be dissolve in water, right? And that's when Dr. I. M. Goingtoproveyouidiotswrongcerzek (he's Polish) busts out the biology textbooks. You see, water has something called osmotic potential. For those of you that are bad at science, we'll just call it "waterism." Dissolving something in water lowers its waterism. Water always moves from areas of high waterism to areas of lower waterism, except when one of the X-men with the power to control water tells it not to. So barring any interfering X-men, water with solutes in it (flavored water) will be LESS HYDRATING (that means not as hydrating) than water with nothing but water in it.
Maybe those Gatorade marketers should spend a little less time being wrong and a little more time getting punched by me. While they're all in the hospital recovering from having their kneecaps stolen, I have an idea for a new marketing campaign that they could launch: "Diet Flavor. With flavor to taste good, and water to keep you going, so you can be a moron longer. Harder. Wetter. With less osmotic potential." Or better yet, it could just say "We don't know anything, but our stuff probably won't kill you, because if it did we wouldn't be able to sell you more of it."
Whatever happened to just having catchy jingles that I could hate?
