17 Oct
2025
17 Oct
'25
8:11 p.m.
On Fri, 2025-10-17 at 16:59 -0700, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote:
On Fri, 17 Oct 2025, Martin Bishop wrote:
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).
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.
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.