A beer ad caught my attention this morning, and I watched the whole thing. That’s good advertising! Except for the fact that it didn’t motivate me to buy any beer at all. It’s titled “The Most Washington Man in the World,” and some of it was true.
I remember refusing to own or use an umbrella, but it was more because I was going to get wet no matter what…but later I learned it was probably more because Washington rain was a continuous gentle drizzle. Midwestern rain is about getting pelted with fierce wind-blown drops, and you need shelter. Worse, I experienced southern rainstorms along the gulf coast, and no way can you ignore that and amble along.
The stuff about beer in the ad is nonsense. When I was growing up, the only debate was between two mass produced cheap beers, Rainier and Oly, and I didn’t care much about either. I was drinking coffee from an early age, though, and yeah, we grew up with Sasquatch lore and would look for him in the woods. Never found him. Also, I-5 is a hellish choke point.
Otherwise, though, the scenes of misty fog and big trees on steep hillsides and seastacks off the coast did make me a little bit homesick.
It’s an odd phenomenon. I lived near Seattle from birth to age 22. I’m 68 now, which means I spent 46 years living in Oregon, the Midwest, Utah, and Pennsylvania, and none of those places made the impression on my identity and self that the Pacific Northwest did. I suspect that if we asked my kids, my oldest might have a strong connection to Philadelphia, but the other two are Minnesota kids. There is such a thing as a sense of place that get fixed in our brains at an early age.
Ah, for the mating calls of the tree-squid in the morning!
So PZ experienced his own version of the Duff / Fudd beer rivalry.
Yes, and neither of the beers were very good. Watery, weak, barely beer.
I grew up with Jax and Pearl. Occasionally, Dad got all fancy with Pabst Blue Ribbon.
I grew up in Kent (the original one in South-East England) until I was ten, but I have no sense of belonging to the place. I hardly ever go back, and I find it quite horrible when I do. I have much more connection with Somerset (South-West England), where we moved to and where I still consider home and go back to in the holidays between teaching terms. Somerset is much more rural and idyllic and laid-back, and you’re much less likely to bump into wild Tories. I spent seven years living in Oxford for university (South-Central), and it felt more like home than Kent, but still not home. Now when I go back it’s the younger generation’s place, not mine, because my experience was so tied to the university and I’m only loosely affiliated as an alumnus now. These days I spend more of my life in Surrey (also South-East, but more central), where I work, now, but Surrey is almost as bad as Kent, in some ways worse (it’s more affluent, full of wealthy Tories).
I went to the North once. I didn’t like it.
Rainier had great commercials.
I’m not disputing that claim, but I don’t think I fit that mold. I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. I went to college in East Tennessee and worked a couple of years in Sarasota, Florida then back to Jacksonville for several years. I married another Jacksonville native, who came out west with a friend and visited San Francisco for 22 hours before returning to Jacksonville. We moved to San Francisco within a year. I had never been to “The City” before crossing the Bay Bridge mid-evening in late August 1974. We drove immediately to the North Beach-Chinatown area, had a bite to eat, and went to City Lights Books. I’ve been here ever since. San Francisco was that “place” in my brain even though I had never seen it. I’ve only been back to Jacksonville for short visits, and haven’t been back at all since 2005. And I have no interest in going back. But then Jacksonville is a sucky town while San Francisco is cool.
Also, the weather. Did I mention the weather? Like I said, San Francisco is cool. And virtually no mosquitoes…ever. What a great place!
I also grew up in Kent, the new one, which got it’s name from the fact that it was a major hop growing region. Despite that, I really dislike IPAs.
I lived in Illinois for my first 9 years, then Oklahoma until I was 30.
I now live near PZ’s old stomping grounds on the east side of Seattle.
I have absolutely no desire to move back to either of those other states.
In my opinion (no studies that I know of) the rain in the last 30 years has gotten more like what we would get in the Midwest. Still mostly gentle misting, but now we do occasionally have heavy pounding rains with some thunder and lighting that we never use to get. And instead of 3-5 days with the temperature over 90, we get 3 weeks of it every summer.
Wife and I are both Hogtown brats who’ve lived in Ottawa for the last 45 years. Over that period, we’ve visited Toronto frequently to visit family, though that’s likely to end now, since the last family member there passed away the other week. And every time we went, I’d think (usually while stuck in traffic on the 401) how glad I was not to live there any more, or indeed anywhere in the GTA. So somehow, my native town isn’t “home”.
Oddly, the place I do feel an attachment to is the North of England (particularly the Dales), where all my ancestors came from, despite not having spent more than a few weeks there, cumulative. So take that, @5.
The north of England is my ancestral homeland, on my father’s side, but the one foreign place I felt most at home was Galway, in Ireland.
Ironically Ireland is my ancestral homeland on my father’s side (his parents are from there), though about 60km to the northeast of Galway in Roscommon.
I grew up in Richmond, VA, but I left to go to college in New Jersey, and have never had any desire to go back, except to visit relatives. I refer to it as “the Ante-Bellum South”.
My experience was that if you said or thought or did anything that hadn’t been said or thought or done back when Robert E. Lee was around, they looked at you like you had three heads. BTW, I think that is what Faulkner meant by “in the South, the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.”
I now live in the NYC area, and I feel more or less at home here. While there are plenty of jerks here, it’s not quite as institutionalized as where I grew up.
Bear Whizz beer. Its in the water. That’s why its yellow.
What made you think this was an actual beer ad? It’s one of a series of AI slop parodies of the Dos Equis “Most Interesting Man” campaign. Didn’t the pronunciation of “Yakima” trip any sensors? To me, the giveaway was how long it was. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a two and a half minute beer ad.
The one for Idaho is as redneck Magat as you’d expect, and the comments all approve wholeheartedly. Not sure they realize it’s a parody.
I was born in Maryland, and lived there and Louisiana for the first six years of my life, but then moved to Massachusetts and have lived here ever since. I’m fifty now, so I consider myself to be from Massachusetts having lived here almost ninety percent of my life.
The Pacific Northwest is one of the regions of the USA that I’ve never even visited- I’ve heard that at least some parts are quite beautiful, and would love to visit someday. Then again, there are lots of places in and outside the US that I would love to visit, but I have very limited financial means.
I grew up just north of Kent… in suburb of Renton called Kennydale. We were one long block from the beach park on Lake Washington. Too much of that ad rings true. After my six years in the Navy (most of it spent in Hawaii) I came back to the Seattle area and have lived here ever since. Even at age 70, I spend more time outdoors (mostly on my bike when it’s not raining) than I do watching TV. In fact, pretty much the only times my TV is turned on is during Seahawks and Mariner games. I’m not a big beer drinker. Yes I own (and wear) flannel shirts.
Was Rainier the beer with a couple in a canoe on the label?
The video had me missing Mildew Manor, the duplex we rented in incorporated Snohomish County (Lynnwood address, Mukilteo school district, Everett phone number) 40 years ago. Always intended to go back but life interfered.
I grew up in Oxford so my connection to it is rather different than cartomancer’s. Being Oxford a lot of it is the same as it’s been for centuries, although there are plenty of changes too. I do return occasionally to see a cousin but don’t usually go into town, it’s just too busy with tourists and students.
Again unlike cartomancer I do like the north, I’ve been moving north since I left home. While the greater Manchester isn’t as wet as Washington it is pretty damp. My husband comes from round about here and his sister lives locally. The country that interleaves with the different suburbs is very different to Oxfordshire, but I like it, though it isn’t as rich.
“Was Rainier the beer with a couple in a canoe on the label?”
You know the joke about sex in a canoe, no?
At least use a narrator who knows how to pronounce Washington place names.
That whole thing seems to be AI generated, so it’s not surprising the narrator can’t pronounce the place names. Major fails are the parking gag where the car has disappeared when they do a semi-closeup after the driver exits the car, coffee house menu board with peculiar pricing, and the RED (CR)OSS ambulance. Subtle changes in the main character’s face, such as creases between the brows, chin and nose shape, and inconsistencies on his ever changing rain jacket along with many text glitches in the background give it away. They did put effort into getting large obvious text right, as in the route name on the bus and the beer names. That masterful AI dog going over the fence near the end must have been trained on Jackie Chan’s drunken out takes.
@cartomancer #5:
Some people can’t cope with being asked if they’d like gravy on their chips.
Alan, you made me look.
Aaaargh!
(I turned it off before the 90 second mark; watching that much was like torture)
@22) “seems to be”? It says it’s AI in the video title and</> in the description. They aren’t trying to hide it. They’ve done a whole series of these.
ugh, the one time I don’t use Preview. ::sneaks an ‘i’ in there after the /::
@25
I was not sure if some of the static beer name images were AI generated or stolen the old fashioned way, thus the qualifier.
So this is the PNW version of a Rick Roll? Ya got me PZ. :) This wasn’t an advertisement for anything, it was random AI slop. I would have cut it at around 15s in once it was apparent it was AI but you said you watched the whole thing so silly me, I did too.
I like Ranier beer and found out just now that it’s brewed only twenty miles away from where I live, which is a weird thing to learn about it, TBH. Back when it was actually brewed up north you could not get it in California for anything.