Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/11/25/how-to-behave-in-a-british-p.html
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I don’t like warm beer.
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These gentle hints were designed to stop “unpleasant incidents” like these, which were covered up until the war was over:
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SHUT THE DOOR, Meredith.
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If you want to read more on the topic the book “When Jim Crow Met John Bull: Black American Soldiers in World War II in Britain” is worth a read.
I used to work with a guy that had been a black MP in Italy at the close of the war. It is probably not an accident that they were set up in a village checking Italian civilian vehicles for black market American tires rather than policing US troops.
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My Austrian grandfather had this special ceramic-tube thingie you filled with hot water, that you could submerge in your beer on cold winter days to get it up to room temperature. I remember a debate with my uncle, who said “if it’s cold, how can you taste it?”
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That was really good
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Yanks: Overpaid, oversexed and over here!
Tommies: Underpaid, underfed and under Ike.,
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This is very cosy (less than 7 new pence for a pint of beer!), but the fun part is the implicit assumption that American GIs would by default be, like, scratching their asses on the carpet
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Holy Moses! I had only watched a bit of it before posting the above, but I just watched further - I didn’t realize the Army had wizards on staff back then! Question is, did Burgess Meredith teleport the rude American away, or just disintegrate him?!?
Don’t mess with the Army Mage Corps, I guess!
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Where the video at???
ETA Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GCcoaSq3x4
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The writing was good, but Meredith really sells it. The talent and charisma radiates through the screen.
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The late Italian author Umberto Eco wrote about how his first introduction to Americans was Black US soldiers sent to secure his small town near Milan after the war. It’s an aside in his famous essay on the nature of fascism. The beginning of the essay is available here (with the rest under a paywall, unfortunately). https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
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Oh my… it’s like a place where everyone might know your name, but will leave you the hell alone until you’re ready to engage. GOODBYE FOREVER, 'MURICA
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Well, nobody likes warm American beer.* And most only tolerate it when it’s properly chilled.
*Thank the gods that the microbrewery and craft beer revolutions make this joke less relevant, to be honest.
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Beer is too generic a term. Some are best a bit chilled, some are best very cold, some rather warmer. British bitter’s taste is best savoured at a warmer temperature, but whatever passes for yellow bubbly beer stuff in parts of US is probably best drunk very cold - of course you wouldn’t like it warm. 
ETA @fnordius beat me to it
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The device is known as a Tauchsieder, and though rare nowadays a lot of older traditional Bavarian pubs still have them for elderly clientele.
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Thanks! I never knew the name of it. Now I no longer have to call it a “little ceramic tube thingie for warming your beer”. 
Oh, I see more advanced ones are electric. Or maybe I was misremembering, and his was electric too.
Not only that, but the proper temperature for a good British beer is cellar temperature (roughly 50° F), not room temperature nor ice-cold.
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The general consensus of opinion seems to be that the only American soldiers with decent manners are the Negroes.
— George Orwell, “As I Please”, Tribune 3 December 1943.
And allegedly one English landlord, faced with US military insistence that he impose a colour bar in his pub, put up a sign reading “Black troops only”.
(Of course, migration from the West Indies a few years after the war would reveal quite different attitudes.)
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