On Fri, 2025-10-17 at 16:59 -0700, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: > On Fri, 17 Oct 2025, Martin Bishop wrote: > > I shall shift into BeerMode, everyone else seems to be there > > [BeerMode raambling] > > British beer is excellent, and always has been. (and, It doesn't need to > be cooled down to the edge of freezing) > My father used to say, "A pint is a pound, the wrold around"; if that ever > was true of British beer, it wouldn't be now, and even as a unit of > measure, a pint is ambiguous.
I am also partial to English beer. My local Altadena pub (which survived the Eaton fire) has ESB in a hand-pumped, not pressurized cask — the only pub in LA county that has one of any brand. Ale should be served at cellar temperature (54°F) because the oils that give it flavor and aroma are heavier than those in lager. Therefore ale is "dead" if served at lager temperature (38°F). > Oil leaks and Lucas Electrics are issues with British cars and > motorcycles, and pretty much not an issue with anything else. Anything else except illegal immigration, censoring undesirable opinions, arresting Irish citizens on their way home through Heathrow for "offensive" twitter posts from USA, dentistry, …. But maybe if Nigel Farage replaces Kier Starmer after the next election some of that (other than dentistry) will be rectified. My brother had a Jaguar XK 120 in the 1960s. An oil change for the magnificent 4.2 liter inline 6 engine required 14 quarts (it was pre- 1964 so I don't know where he got the 4.2 liter engine; maybe it was a bored-out 3.8). Until the day he died, he regretting having sold it. When Ford bought Jaguar they tried to make them yet more Mazda jellybeans, sacrificing what by then was the only remaining attraction of Jaguar: the styling. My son had a colleague who owned a Jaguar with a chalked-out paint job. He asked "what's the point of owning a Jag if it doesn't have nice paint?" I had a 1954 Triumph T110 motorcycle. I still regret selling it. I had a colleague who was part of the team trying to break the motorcycle land speed record with a T110. They tried new fuels, new plugs, new camshaft, port and polish the intake and exhaust, bigger valves, … everything they could think of. They wanted to put two carbatooters on it but the intake ports went straight back and there wasn't room for two. They got the factory to send new heads with the intake ports angled 15° outward, put on two carbs, and broke the record. That was the birth of the T120 Triumph Bonneville, and "The World's Fastest Motorcycle" on the speedometer. Unfortunately, the new Triumph motorcycles have the brake and gearshift on the wrong sides now.
