Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Dwyane Wade is better than you at standing up

This has been bugging us for quite some time: Dwyane Wade's Converse commercial. You know the one. "Fall down seven times. Stand up eight."

Now, the commercial is pretty cool - anytime you get to see clips of NBA players in high school, that's kinda neat. And when Dwyane is "knocked over" and laying out of bounds, and gives that camera that little head nod...well, it's so fake even Danny Almonte wasn't buying it (a Danny Almonte reference! what year is it?!?!). But the tag line...it, well...it just doesn't make any sense.

Think about it. If you fall down once, how many times do you have to get up? Once, right? OK, so if you fall down twice, you get up...twice! Good, you're starting to get the hang of things here. Let's see if we can keep the pattern going: three falls...stand up three times! Now let's really get crazy: if you fall down seven times, how many times should I stand up?

Eight. Very good, class.

Even David Beckham could figure this out.

Does this make sense to anyone else? Why do you have to stand up eight times, if you only tripped seven? What if Converse ran an ad saying, "fall down once, stand up twice." They'd get hammered! Are we all really that bad at math? Seven and eight are too high for us?

(And this is coming from someone who has dropped more math classes than a certain college allows. Something isn't right here.)

2 comments so far. Might as well add your own.:

Anonymous said...

hate to rain on your parade here...but in order to fall down, one first must be standing up. so it goes stand once..fall...stand 2x to get back up. and so on, you can follow the logic now right? good job.

point 23 said...

A quick rebuttal: that line of thinking doesn't add up, much like the initial commercial.

If you are going to count the initial "standing up" (like, say, when Dwyane got out of bed that day) then you have to count every time he stood up before he was knocked over. So maybe the commercial should say, "Fall down 7 times, stand up 342453." The point is, only those times you stand up as a result of falling down are counted. So if you fall seven times, you get up seven times.

And I think that's about all the energy I have left to devote to such a meaningless topic. Whew.