Monday in Santa Fe

02010-04-26 | Photos | 11 comments

After a quick trip to the Phoenix area, where Michael and I played for a private party, we came home on Saturday. Rehearsals for the East coast run start tomorrow. Time to think up a set list.
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Upaya Newsletter for 4/26/2010
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.
— His Holiness the Dalai Lama

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In Bavaria and Austria there is a commercial product called “Radler”, or bicyclist in English. It’s a half and half mix of lemonade and a blond lager:

The drink was invented in the Roaring Twenties by Franz Xaver Kugler, a fellow who is as home-grown a Bavarian as pretzels and lederhosen. Herr Kugler was a railroad worker turned innkeeper who opened his watering hole, the Kugleralm (meaning: Kugler’s alpine meadow), toward the end of the nineteenth century in a little place called Deisenhofen, some 12 miles outside Munich. When, after World War I, bicycle riding became a popular pastime in Germany, Herr Kugler arranged for the construction of a bike trail through the forest, from Munich straight to his establishment—only to get himself into trouble…almost. He had not planned for what businessmen call the up-side risk, when, on a fine Saturday in June 1922, some 13,000 cyclists descended upon the Kugleralm and demanded beer. They almost depleted Franz Xaver’s stock of brew.

The Kugleralm without beer would have been a catastrophe! But the quick-thinking innkeeper had a bright idea. He had several thousand bottles of clear lemon soda in his cellar, a beverage that had proven virtually unsaleable to his beer-loving Bavarian public. To save the day, and to get rid of what he considered some useless inventory, he mixed this lemon soda with his remaining beer at a 50/50 ratio and proudly declared that he had invented this concoction deliberately just for the cyclists so that they would not fall off their bikes on their way home. He called the mixture a Radlermass (Radler means cyclist in German, Mass means a liter of beer). In Herr Kugler’s case, need became the mother of invention.

More history here. Boris told me that this is also called “Alsterwasser”. The Alster is a river in the North of Germany (wikipedia entry) and wasser means water… and I just found an entry in the German Beer Institute North American website. I also found an entry for the best beer in the world.

Anyway, I had a few cans of Pellegrino Limonata and a bottle of Bohemia in the fridge and mixed to taste:

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Thats was me, taking a photo on Friday Morning. Photo by MC.
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Here are a few of the photos I took:






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From neobohemia:

dewdrop world

This dewdrop world-
It may be a dewdrop,
And yet- and yet-

-Issa


The second Great Buddha of Kamakura.  The first, made of wood and was damaged by a storm and later by fire.  Replaced in 1252 by this work in bronze which at one time was covered with gold leaf and only the ears have a big of gold still detectable.  The swirl on the forehead is made of silver.  It has endured earthquakes and tsunami.
(Via neo bohemia)

I visited that site in 1978 and took this photo:

(((this is a scan from a small print and on the left you can see the scotchtape which held it in a Journal)))
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Armchair Travel:

(Via Pop Wuping)
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Check yer logins and change your passwords, I suppose. Good luck.

Russian Hacker Selling 1.5M Facebook Accounts
A hacker who calls himself Kirllos has obtained and is now offering to sell 1.5 million Facebook IDs at astonishingly low prices — $25 per 1,000 IDs for users with fewer than 10 friends and $45 per 1,000 IDs for users with more than 10 friends. Looking at the numbers, Kirllos has stolen the IDs of one out of every 300 Facebook users. Quoting: ‘VeriSign director of cyber intelligence Rick Howard told the New York Times that it appeared close to 700,000 had already been sold. Kirllos would have earned at least $25,000 from the scam. Howard told the newspaper that it was not apparent whether the accounts and passwords were legitimate, but a Russian underground hacking magazine reported it had tested some of Kirllos’ previous samples and managed to get into people’s accounts.
(Via Slashdot)

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Stephen Hawking takes the hard line on aliens | Leo Hickman
I’m with Stephen Hawking on this one. Even if we were show to them we can calculate pi to a billion decimal places, aliens are bound to be trigger happy when they meet us for the first time. And given our past form, who would blame them?
(Via Guardian Science)

11 Comments

  1. Carol

    Amazing! Here you are just back from a musical trip and getting ready to go on a much longer tour….and still you take time and thought to write about not just one but many interesting subjects.
    I hope aliens are kind to animals and other specimans.

    Reply
  2. Brenda

    Thanks for history of the lemon soda and beer mix from Germany. I always like to hear the story of the actual inventor, it is always so genuine and not a copy. Original sometimes gets lost to just a copy. Like your sound, I am sure you are copied but there is only one orginal Ottmar. That is good.

    Reply
  3. dave

    I knew I’d seen your picture of the Great Buddha before … it’s on the Opium enhanced cd.

    Reply
  4. Michael C.

    Lemonade & Beer, called a Shandy in England, Wikipedia has some good information. Cheers.

    Reply
  5. Ottmar

    Brenda: thank you.

    Dave: could be. Good memory! That CD doesn’t work in any computer made in this century, or does it?

    Michael: nope, a shandy is ginger ale ‘n’ beer. I haven’t tried that, but I am not running out to buy ginger ale, if ya catch my drift. I mean, lemonade ‘n’ beer – that spells summer! Ginger ale ‘n’ beer… don’t know about that, it makes me think of upset stomachs or winter… :-)

    Reply
  6. dave

    I popped it in my office Dell this AM & was surprised when I was able to open Pandora’s box. I hadn’t checked it out in quite a few years.

    Reply
  7. Carol

    I can get part of it, too. There’s a number of photos on that that I’d love to see more clearly. That was fun!

    Reply
  8. Carol

    Oh I will, Ottmar. We have so much to learn from our whale companions.

    Reply
  9. Panj

    I second that ‘Thanks’ for your thoughtfulness, Ottmar! I remember those bike trails in that area…It seemed there were hundreds and hundreds of miles, all over the place and was so amazed when we moved back to the States, that there were none here. I will check out the whale site tomorrow and sign it. Have you seen the whale in China, a Buluga i belive, who loves art posters and LOVES to paint!!! Since i am already Thanking you…Thanks again for ALL the Music…not only is it beautiful, but sanity saving!!! :-)
    God Speed!!!

    Reply
  10. yumi

    Spontaneous photo by MC of OL = Good humor.

    Reply

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