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Archives for May 13, 2013

Beer In Ads #886: Mr. Basketball

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Monday’s ad is for Pabst Blue Ribbon, from 1950. It’s one of Pabst’s “What’ll You Have” ads, but featuring a sports celebrity, George Mikan. In post-war America, Mikan was known as “Mr. Basketball” and was the Lakers’ center when they still played in a state with lots of lakes. He’s considered a pioneer of modern basketball, and retired as the all-time leading scorer. The NBA actually altered the rules of the game to reduce his dominance and he was directly responsible for the three-point line was and partially for the shot clock. And apparently he drank Pabst.

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Examining Our Compulsions For The Next Session

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For our 76th Session, our host is Glen Humphries, who writes Beer is Your Friend. His topic is an extension of another recent Session, the one about Beer Audits. That Session inspired him and as he was “writing about buying heaps of beer, [it] got [him] thinking about just what it is that compels [him] to keep buying beer.” In other words, why do we keep buying so much beer? So here’s his invitation to The Session for June 2013 and his topic, Compulsion:

Like most beer fans, I tend to buy way more beer than I can drink. I can have a fridge full, plus a few boxes of bottles, plus homebrew and still I’ll walk into a shop and buy some more. Or order some more online. Or do both in the space of a few days.

Why do we do stuff like this? Obviously we’re not just buying stuff to drink because, if we were, wouldn’t we just wait until we were running low and then stock up? What so many of us do is stock up, even though we’re already stocked up. Perhaps we’re expecting the zombie apocalypse to happen soon and don’t want to go through that sober.

Is buying heaps of beer something you worry about? Do you look at your Aladdin’s Cave of beer and feel even a smidge of guilt about how much it all cost you? Or do you just rub your hands together, cackle with glee and say ‘‘it’s mine! All mine!’’.

What lengths do you go to to hide this compulsion? For instance, do you try and sneak beer into the house so your other half doesn’t see it? (Not saying that I’ve done this. Oh, okay, I have done this).

It’s a compulsion that can extend to homebrewing too. Do you keep making new batches of homebrew, even though you already have plenty of your own brews to drink?

If you’re on holidays and you drive by a brewery, are you compelled to stop in? Or do you go so far as arrange your holidays to ensure that you happen to drive by a brewery or two? On the offbeat side of compulsion, I know I can be compelled to try a beer I just know will be crap. Like Destroyer, that beer the band KISS put out. Absolute crap. And I knew that before I bought it. But I still bought a six-pack of it.

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So on Friday, June 7 — would that be “E-Day?” — admit your own beer-buying compulsions and wax philosophically about the reasons why you buy what you buy.