philippos42 | a parable of piss

http://theferrett.livejournal.com/1750617.html

...if a soft drink company had, as part of its advertisements, a consistent emphasis on “OUR DRINK WILL MAKE YOUR PEE TASTE LIKE APPLE JUICE!” – well, you can bet your ass that it’s a drink I’d be reluctant to try. I don’t really wanna taste my own pee, let alone make it taste better. But I could certainly see it as an attention-getting novelty factor for a new soda eager to increase sales, and I’d think, well, this is a college craze that will end soon. Kind of like Goldschlager, but with less gold and more tasty pee.

But if every single major soft drink company had, for the past decade, emblazoned their cans with “NOW 50% MORE APPLE FLAVOR IN YOUR URINE!” – well, then my attitude starts to change. I think, “Well, certainly they seem to have this bizarre emphasis on urine-drinking, which is very off-putting to those of us who are not fond of aqua vitae. But since they’re all doing it, and doing it so consistently, I can only assume that the majority of soda-drinkers like to recycle.”

The alternative flies in the face of Occam’s Razor. Yes, it certainly could be that the soda companies are hammering on this relentless message in the hopes of, say, depressing the sales of the apple juice industry. Or that most soda drinkers don’t enjoy drinking their own pee, or know anyone who does, but they are nevertheless very concerned with having fruit-flavored urine. Or that nobody really is all that fond of the urine campaign, but by coincidence both Coke and Pepsi do it anyway. But it’s unlikely.

Now, this relentless marketing is prone to some misinterpretation, of course. It could be, quite reasonably, that the soda-drinkers don’t drink their own urine, but they’re all dating urolagnists who long to be showered upon. Perhaps my specifics are a little off! But it’s not incorrect to say, “There’s a clearly lot of urine-guzzling going on in the soda community,” even if that pisses off the fine soda aficionados who don’t drink urine, don’t know anybody who does drink urine, and they really just love Coke Zero for its amazing, addictive taste.