Ichiro’s devious Papua New Guinea beer update update
“Usually I enjoy Japanese beer, but given the situation, if I was objectively watching the game, I wouldn’t care if it was Japanese beer, American beer or beer from Papua New Guinea.†— Ichiro
In our quest to honor Ichiro’s wishes and consume American, Japanese, and Papua New Guinean beers as the team finishes out this season, we were briefly stymied by the total lack of Papua New Guinean beers in Washington. Or, it appeared, anywhere we could get to.
But we rallied! And came up with some ideas. Some others claimed they could get Washington State Liquor Kombinat stores to special order the beer, but I haven’t heard from anyone that did it, so I’m betting that turned out to not be true.
I ordered from this place, and was skeptical of their claimed quick delivery time. This turned out to be prescient as it took them quite a while to respond at all to my order.
My order number was in the single digits, and it wasn’t nine. I would bet that they were all sitting around peacefully, minding their own business, when suddenly the cute little website they’d thrown up started to spit out shipping manifests for Ichiro loyalists, and they had to run over to the store to buy some beer to ship people.
But it’s coming, or so they claim in their latest email. And I remember that I wrote this:
Ichiro can’t come out and call for the fans to rise up and oust this inept franchise, to somehow make a change from the people who represent ownership on down. He may even have no idea how it could happen. He doesn’t know how a huge, angry, resentful fan base might pull this off.
But Ichiro has faith in us, in our ability to unite together to acquire crazy obscure beers where there are no local sources to be found, and from that, to go on and affect the larger, even more difficult changes we all know must happen here.
And in each of these victories, cracking open a bottle of potentially delicious beer or watching the franchise build a winning team around our favorite players, will be all the sweeter for having seemed impossible from where we stand now.
That was May 26th, and look what’s happened since then. Ichiro knows what he’s doing.
Papua New Guinea beer update: Ichiro’s devious plan
The efforts of USSM fans to locatePapua New Guinea beer has so far been for nothing: no local beer seller has any of their beers in stock, it does seem that there is no North American distributor for them.
When I made my run around to the places I signed up to check, I felt increasingly like I do about the season: here’s this cool thing we can all do, it’s kind of silly but what the heck, it involves Ichiro and it’s funny, and in a way it pokes fun at our status as stalwart Ichiro defenders here. And it turned into something futile: there’s no way any of us here can get any of those beers, and we’ll have to live with the disappointment.
But no. That’s not it at all.
Ichiro knew.
He’s smart. He didn’t pick Papua New Guinea out of thin air, no. He’s spent enough time in Seattle, he knows there’s no SP Lager here. No, Ichiro wanted us to run up against this obstacle, to stare at it and think “well, I guess we give up.”
Because we have two choices now: we give up, or we find another way. Right now, we’re powerless, defeated, and there doesn’t seem to be much we can do. But there is. This isn’t trying to get to the moon in two days. These beers exist in locations and only need to be moved to somewhere we can affect a purchase. Ichiro doesn’t know how we’ll pull this off, but he knows it will happen, and he dropped this hint for an equally important reason.
Ichiro can’t come out and call for the fans to rise up and oust this inept franchise, to somehow make a change from the people who represent ownership on down. He may even have no idea how it could happen. He doesn’t know how a huge, angry, resentful fan base might pull this off.
But Ichiro has faith in us, in our ability to unite together to acquire crazy obscure beers where there are no local sources to be found, and from that, to go on and affect the larger, even more difficult changes we all know must happen here.
And in each of these victories, cracking open a bottle of potentially delicious beer or watching the franchise build a winning team around our favorite players, will be all the sweeter for having seemed impossible from where we stand now.
First things first: how do we import these beers, or get someone local with suitable licenses to import these beers for us?
Now we must come together as fans to find and consume beers from Papua New Guinea
“Usually I enjoy Japanese beer, but given the situation, if I was objectively watching the game, I wouldn’t care if it was Japanese beer, American beer or beer from Papua New Guinea.†— Ichiro
Being nothing if not devoted, near-slavish zombies who worship Ichiro here at USSM, I feel we must now carry out his will and find beer to drink while we cheer (and boo)(we boo with love). American beers are available at every corner mart. Japanese beers, still no problem. But as all good followers do, we must now take the words of our hero too seriously and locate places that carry the only beers from Papua New Guinea, all brewed by South Pacific Brewery Ltd:
– South Pacific Export Lager
– SP Lager Beer
– Niugini Ice (this is obviously lower priority, as chances are the others are a lot more drinkable)
From the SP site, this is what
SP Lager Beer:
Niugini Ice:
The ice beer has its own website “Devoted to the Niugini chillout culture“. Maybe that’s what we need to do: chill out.
So here’s what we need in the comments, so that I can put up a good tracking page for dedicated Mariner fans who want to make it through this season:
– confirmed sightings of these beers, with prices and stock details if you can manage it
– pictures of you with purchased SP Brewery products. Bonus points if you’re at Safeco Field (warning! open container laws mean you should probably keep them shut, though obviously… yeah) and super bonus points if you can get pictures of you, the can/bottle/etc with Ichiro. In fact, you’ll pretty much be my hero if you can get a picture of you, Ichiro, and SP Lager.
– other helpful information related to tracking down these beers, like “I called the SP Brewery and they’re distributed in Seattle by Esposito’s Entirely Legitimate Import-Export Business”
That’s it. We know SP Lager might suck. And I don’t want to hear that this is a stupid project, or Ichiro sucks, or anything of the sort. If you’re not on board with this noble endeavor, then I feel sorry that you can’t get on board with this potentially fun activity born out of this season’s horrible start. Please take your negativity elsewhere, because we have beers to find.
Thank you.
Game 50, Mariners at Yankees
Silva v Mussina. 10:05 our time.
SP Lager: Official Beer of the 2008 Mariner Season.
“Usually I enjoy Japanese beer, but given the situation, if I was objectively watching the game, I wouldn’t care if it was Japanese beer, American beer or beer from Papua New Guinea,†he said.
Game 73, Mariners at Dodgers
Art Thiel had a piece today – well, I suppose I should say last night, since that’s the timestamp and now that the P-I’s only online, it’s not like there’s “today’s edition” of the paper to talk about – on how Ichiro is getting no media attention. Selfish Ichiro, waiting until the media have other things to focus on (Griffey!) before giving them something to write about.
Really, I’d argue that based on performance so far, it could even be his best season ever. The hitting is up there with hit-record-breaking 2004, except it’s not all singles all the time like it was then. If you want to find fault, though, he’s not walking (at all – only 5 unintentional) and his base-stealing has been subpar.
There’s also a peculiar sequence in which Thiel gives Ichiro’s responses to some apparently uninspired reporter questioning. The frequent cliche-ness of interview questions is really a shame with somebody like Ichiro, because we know he has interesting (insightful, quirky, quasi-literary) things to say, not just the stock answers you usually see. But what caught my eye was this comment, about how he feels compared to last year:
“I don’t remember how I felt last June.”
Maybe it’s because he was drowning his sorrows. And if you imagine that time as an employee, which he is, and your company is in the toilet, people around you getting laid off, others making veiled threats, your bosses being fired, that’s a pretty traumatic numbing experience. Anyway, apparently things are much happier now by all accounts. As nice as it would be for Ichiro to put the team on his back and carry it while being a clubhouse leader and catering to the media, can we get him some help?
Can you remember how you felt about the team back then? Has it changed? Should we be happy now or still frustrated?