Todd Bradley’s Galaxy

This morning’s accomplishment:

Once upon a time, there was a musical group called 404 Not Found. It started in 1996 as my project to make unusual electronic music for my friends and other people who were into that sort of thing. I met a few people online with similar tastes and we collaborates. It eventually morphed stylistically into a more traditional “band” with a set group of musicians performing poetry and spoken word pieces set to simple but occasionally strange rock music. Our last performance was April 1, 2004.  Over those 8 years, we recorded 6 full length CDs.

Even now, 5 years later, I occasionally get small royalty checks from one of the people who sell our music online. And I also recently got an email from my website hosting service saying my account now has unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth.

So I decided to just upload the 404 Not Found CDs so people can download them for free! All tracks are in 160 Mbps MP3 format. You can either download individual tracks or a ZIP file containing all tracks from a given CD.

The CDs I uploaded are: Something Is Wrong (1997), In the Beginning (1998), Eclectronic (1999), Nightmare Lullaby (2002), Warts and All (2002), and our grand finale Paper Cuts (2004).

If you already own one of the limited edition physical CDs, treasure it!  Otherwise, if you just want to hear some of our music to see what it was like, click here to browse the selections.  You can find more information about the band on our website.

After watching Mythbusters on my TiVo over the weekend, I just had to geek out and post - for the first time - to the online Mythbusters discussion forum. Yes, 18 years later my aerospace engineering studies still occasionally come in handy for something!

Here’s what I had to say:

http://community.discovery.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/9401967776/m/11219196101/p/4

These aren’t the steps I followed the other night when I sauteed some scallops and served them over soba noodles.  But they are the steps I SHOULD have followed.  Next time I’m in the mood for some scallops, this is how I’m going to make them.

Todd’s Sauteed Scallops and Soba

Ingredients (for 2 servings):

• 6 fresh sea scallops - I got some good ones from Whole Foods.  Don’t bother with the ones from King Soopers.  If they smell fishy, don’t buy them.
• miso paste - I use the stuff that comes in a squeezable bottle for quickly making miso soup
• 2 limes
• soba noodles - originally my plan was to use udon noodles, but all we had was soba
• 1 small yellow squash
• 1 roma tomato
• 3 to 5 fresh shiitake mushrooms
• 1/2 cup chopped onion - I used yellow, but you could use a white onion instead
• soy sauce, preferably tamari
• 4 ounces of snow peas, washed and “de-veined”
• 2 cups Not-Beef veggie broth - this stuff is the best veggie broth I’ve ever had
• cooking oil
• pepper

Instructions:

This dish has four layers to it.  From the top down, there’s going to be a miso lime sauce, then the scallops, then the snow peas, and finally a mixture of noodles and veggies.

Let’s make the miso lime sauce first.  In a small nonstick pan, squeeze the juice from the limes and add about one tablespoon of miso paste.  Grind some black pepper into it, and then add two tablespoons of the veggie broth.  You could add a little sesame oil if you want, or some sriracha.  Bring this to a boil over medium heat, reducing it down to the consistency of gravy.  Now set this aside.

Boil up some soba noodles.  As always, be sure not to overcook them.  Set aside enough noodles for two people.  The noodles are going to be the base of this dish, so don’t skimp.  Now, make the veggie broth.  Soak the noodles in the broth until it’s time to add the veggies.

Dice the tomato, the onion, the squash, and the mushrooms.  Saute these in a really hot pan with a little oil.  Add a teaspoon or so of soy sauce, and a tablespoon of veggie broth, and stir it all until the veggies soften.  Now, toss in the soba noodles and stir a little more.  Take it all off the heat and cover so it doesn’t get cold.

Heat up two more pans, one for sauteeing the scallops and one for stir frying the snow peas.  Put a tiny bit of oil in each pan.  You want these to be done at the same time, so start the scallops first.  Let them cook on one side for a few minutes and then sprinkle some soy sauce on the top.  When the bottoms look good and brown, turn them over so the other side sautees.

(I may try cooking these on the Weber grill over charcoal next time, instead of indoors on the stove.  We’ll see…)

Meanwhile, put the snow peas in their own sautee pan and stir fry rapidly.  Be careful not to overcook them, because they should be crisp when served.  If all goes well, the snow peas and scallops are done at the same time.

Put the veggie/noodle mixture in a nice bed on the plate.  Then, top it with snow peas.  Top those with the scallops.  And then drizzle the miso lime reduction over the top of the scallops.

Serve al fresco with fork and knife.

You probably already know I’m working on a film called “Kung Fu Sushi Chefs.”  I just ran across a couple of trailers on YouTube for a movie from Hong Kong called (in English) “Kung Fu Chefs.”  Check it out:

Trailer #1 for “Kung Fu Chefs”:

Trailer #2 for “Kung Fu Chefs”:

Here’s the most insightful thing I’ve read on the internet this week:  “I dunno . . . it always seemed to me that calling NIN “industrial” was like calling Black Sabbath a “blues” band.”

From this Boing Boing article:

Documentary about Nine Inch Nails and industrial music - Boing Boing

Did you know that today, May 14, 2009 is Denver’s “Grow Local Day”? Yes, it is! It was so declared by Mayor John Hickenlooper. And I can’t believe I had to read about it only instead of hearing about it first from Beth, who’s become quite the local Denver expert.

Here’s a story about Hickenlooper’s announcement:
http://www.kdvr.com/news/kdvr-hickgardens-051409,0,1424333.story

In Broomfield, everyone is getting their “2009 Real Property Notice of Valuation” letters last week and this week. Folks are in an uproar because the county is assessing property so high, when property values are actually going down. Some say it’s an intentional act on the part of the Broomfield government to drive up property taxes, given that sales tax revenues are down due to the crappy economy.

HOWEVER, I just looked at our letter, and the county is saying our property did in fact decrease in value over the past two years. According to their letter, our house lost $19,000 in value since the last assessment. So how come ours went down so much when everyone else is complaining about their going up?

Thanks to modern genetic research, we’ve known for a while that humans all descended from the same stock (”Mitochondrial Eve” is our common female ancestor) somewhere in Africa.  Yes, all of us white folks are the result of a genetic mutation that happened some time later, contrary to what a lot of white supremacists and Christian artists would like you to believe.

But now the new chapter in the story is that they’ve been able to pinpoint with pretty good certainty the region of Africa where our common ancestors came from.  Here’s a Boing Boing summary of an interesting (and short) New York Times article:

New Genetic Survey: Humans Originated Near Current Border of Angola and Namibia - Boing Boing

Snip from a NYT article about a new study by a group of geneticists which pins the origin of humankind to a spot on the coast of southwest Africa near the Kalahari Desert.

Next time you give your kid a box of raisins because it’s supposedly a “healthy” snack, consider how much sugar is concentrated in those dried raisins.

SugarStacks.com is a website that shows the amount of sugar contained in every day type foods, represented by sugar cubes.  That photo above explains why Dr. Fuhrman’s “Eat to Live” diet forbids dried fruit, which I always assumed to be nutritious.

Sugar Stacks - How Much Sugar Is in That?