Todd Bradley’s Galaxy

From The Smoking Gun:
Actress Heather Locklear was arrested by the California Highway Patrol in September 2008 on suspicion of driving under the influence of prescription drugs. After receiving a call from a motorist who saw the 47-year-old Locklear driving erratically, officers found the TV star parked on the side of a road blocking traffic. She was booked into the Santa Barbara County Jail where she posed for the below mug shot before posting $5000 bail.

Is it Botox, or is it the prescription drugs?

By the way, I wonder whatever became of Yasmine Bleeth.  Years ago, after she got arrested for cocaine possession, I put up before and after photos of her, like below:

I just found out some exciting news!  Broomfield is getting a real natural supermarket.  It’s not Wild Oats / Whole Foods, or even Vitamin Cottage.  It’s Sprouts Farmers Market.  Supposedly they’re opening in October next to Staples near (or in, maybe) the now-defunct Albertson’s on 120th.

I’d never heard of Sprouts before, so I had to check it out.  You can, too, by going here:

Welcome to Sprouts Farmers Market

The only problem is it’s not actually in Broomfield.  That side of the intersection is Westminster.  So Westminster now has a Wild Oats, a Vitamin Cottage, and soon a Sprouts.  And Broomfield’s got Wal-Mart, King Soopers, Safeway, and soon another Wal-Mart.

Ever wonder why Westminster is able to get all the coolness, and Broomfield isn’t?  I wonder, too.

Todd in profile as seen by the CT scan

Today I took the day off work for a couple reasons.  First, my parents needed someone to take them to the airport at an ungodly hour.  I got up at 4:26 AM in order to drop them off at 5:45 AM, so they could catch a plane for Africa.

So I decided that since I was going to be in the vicinity, I might as well schedule my head CT for this morning and just do that on the way back from the airport.  So at 7:00 AM I had the head CT, and then at 8:45 AM, I had an appointment with my ear doctor to look over the results.

Long story short: He confirmed that I have superior canal dehiscence on the right side, just as we suspected from the MRI results last week and from my history.  I may have it on the left side, too, but the right side is the one that’s bothering me.

This is good – but frightening – news.  The good news is that after 13 years, 3 doctors (not counting my primary care physician), a couple of misdiagnoses, and some acupunture that didn’t do squat, I finally have a clear diagnosis with physical proof!  Woo hoo!  And they can even probably fix this.  The scary part is that in order to repair the dehiscence, I’ll have brain surgery.  And of course there is no guarantee that it’ll fix the problems, and it may cause other problems.  But if you’d lived with this problem for over a decade, I think you would agree it’s worth the risk.

Below is the image that (according to the doctors) is the smoking gun.  If you knew what to look for you could see that the top part of the superior canal has dehisced, or opened up, into the brain cavity.

On the off chance you wonder what I do for a living, the product I’ve been working on at Polycom for the past year just got officially announced.  It is the Polycom Distributed Media Application™ DMA 7000.

Here’s our press release:

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Polycom-Inc-NASDAQ-PLCM-899775.html

And here’s our product web page:

http://www.polycom.com/usa/en/products/video/conference_management_scheduling/dma_7000.html

Beth Partin asked me to take the “Omnivore 100 Survey“.  Here goes.  The instructions:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile (I’ve had alligator, but not crocodile)
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda (I don’t even know what that is!)
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi (I’ve only had sweet lassi)
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar (I’ve had them separately, but not at the same time)
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear (I’ve even made this!)
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

UPDATE: I originally counted 59 out of 100, but Mom pointed out that I’ve had kaolin because it’s an ingredient of Kaopectate which she gave me as a child.  And I also realized I’ve eaten whole bugs, on accident.  So now I’m up to 61 / 100.

I still have 6 on my “no way” list.  Here’s how Beth answered.

(The above photo is an MRI slice of my head.  This picture shows that (a) I do have a brain and (b) that I don’t have a tumor.  If you know just where to look, you can see my left and right superior semicircular canals.)

Those who have known me a long time know that for the past 13 years or so, I have had problems with my ears.  The primary symptom is something called “autophony” which basically means that I hear the sound of my own voice very loud.  I also hear my heartbeat pretty often, as well as – believe it or not – the sound of my eyeballs moving in their sockets when they move back and forth.  Weird stuff.

For most of the past 13 years, it’s been an intermittent thing, where these symptoms only happen maybe 5 minutes at a time 2 or 3 times a day.  But for the past 2 months my right ear has been doing this non-stop.  The exact cause is still unknown.

I’ve been an enigma to something like 3 different doctors now.  The first specialist was an ear, nose, and throat (ENT) doctor who gave me steroids and later installed tubes in my ears.  Neither thing worked.  So I tried acupuncture, which also didn’t help.  After that I just gave up for several years.

The second specialist dealt solely with the ear (not the nose and throat).  He thought maybe I had something called “endolymphatic hydrops” which is related to Meniere’s disease.  But that got ruled out after I went on a very low sodium diet and cut out caffeine for a few months.  (I lost something like 15 pounds of water weight, but the ear problems didn’t go away, and the weight came back when I stopped taking the diuretic pills.)

The next theory was that I have “patulous eustachian tube” (PET) which is where your eustachian tube, which normally opens only when you need to equalize air pressure from your ear to the outside world, sticks in the open position.  PET causes autophony symptoms, but from what I’ve read from people who have it for sure, I’ve never been totally sure that’s what I have.  When I force my eustachian tubes open (by blowing my nose in a certain way, for instance) what I hear is different than what I hear when I’m having the weird ear symptoms.

I did try some nose drops for a while.  It was a medicine called Patul-End, and the goal was to irritate the opening from the eustachian tubes into the sinus cavity (back near the throat) so that they would close up.  The medicine was terrible, though.  Plus it never really seemed to help.  So I gave up the quest for another 3 years ago.

Recently, I visited a new audiologist in town, who eventually recommended I see an ear specialist who is a research professor at the CU Medical Center in Aurora.  I visited him, and he and his staff have put me through a whole battery of tests, some of which I’ve had before and some of which are totally new and alien to me.

On Monday, I spent the morning at the CU hospital doing a couple more tests (an MRI and a VEMP test, if you want to know the details).  This doctor has a new theory, which I hadn’t heard before.  He wants to pursue the possibility that I have “superior canal dehiscence syndrome” (SCDS).  What is SCDS?  Basically, it’s where there’s a hole in the skull bone that holds the brain and keeps it separated from the semicircular canals that give you balance.

So I’ll be going back soon for a head CT, which is about 3 times the resolution of the MRI I had.  After I got home from the doctor, I started doing some research online into SCDS and I am very optimistic about this new theory.  Why?  Because the symptoms that I’ve read about sound to me like they fit what I have more than any other disease I’ve read about so far.  However, I don’t have many of the symptoms that are typical of SCDS, so I’m not really sure.  We’ll see what the head CT says.

Here are a couple of other old blog articles I made on the topic of my ears:

http://www.toddbradley.com/?p=231

http://www.toddbradley.com/?p=233

Beth’s on this kick where she’s sampling chocolate from every single store in the Denver metro area, and then writing articles on which ones are the best.  This means that we are now on a 94% chocolate diet.  And at the current rate, I have a feeling it’s going to take about 8 more weeks for her to get through just the first half of the alphabet.  I am so sick of chocolate already!

But if you want to know where to find the best chocolates in Denver, go check out her blog.

I had some problems with our pressure cooker last night.  But once I got it working right, what emerged was pretty awesome.  I had it for lunch today and thought I should write down the recipe.  So here goes.

The dish is made out of three main parts, and I’ll address each of those separately although you can make them somewhat in parallel.

Cilantro Rice

The easiest part is cilantro rice.  Take 2 cups of dry sushi rice and steam it in a rice maker.  Chop 1/2 to 3/4 of a bunch of cilantro, and mix it in, along with a little salt to taste.

Adobo Chicken

Start with 4 chicken thighs (bone in, skin on).  Put them in a big plastic bag with some adobo seasonings.  I use Goya brand.  I think it’s made of mainly salt, garlic powder, and onion powder though I’m not exactly sure.

Shake the chicken around so the pieces have some seasoning all over.

Then, grill the chicken thighs over direct flame.  Feel free to burn the skin, because you’re going to remove it anyhow.  Once the chicken is cooked, take it off the grill and let it rest a little.  After cooling some, remove the skin and discard it.

Borracho Beans

Chop a yellow onion and mince 2 cloves of garlic.  Heat some cooking oil in the bottom of a pressure cooker to high heat.  Throw in the onion and garlic and fry them up.

Meanwhile, measure out 2 cups of dried pinto beans.  Once the garlic and onion are nicely fried, toss in the beans.  Then add 4 cups of chicken broth, 2 cups of water, some salt (not too much), a half cup of spicy salsa, and a bottle of crappy “Mexican” beer like Corona.

Put the chicken thighs on top of all this, seal up the pressure cooker, and let everything come to a boil.  Once it does, turn down the heat to low and let it all cook for 90 minutes or so.

To Serve

Once the borracho beans are cooled enough to open the lid of pressure cooker, get a bowl ready.  In the bowl, lay down a layer of cilantro rice.  Then, on top of that, put a layer of the bean mixture.  And then a little grated cheddar cheese.  Then some of the chopped tomato.  Finally, put one of the chicken thighs on the very top.

The chicken is going to be nearly falling off the bone at this point because it’s so tender, so be careful that it doesn’t just disintegrate on the way from the crock pot to your bowl.

And now, enjoy!

Here’s some sad news from the world of film:

Voice of Movie Trailers Dies at 68 – Obituary (Obit) – NYTimes.com
Don LaFontaine, the man who popularized the catch phrase ”In a world where…” and lent his voice to thousands of movie trailers, has died. He was 68.

Todd Bradley standing near a bristlecone pine

Today we visited the Bristlecone Pines Scenic Area, near Alma, Colorado.  Here are some photos:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/20201392@N00/sets/72157607066450135/

These trees are the oldest in Colorado, at around 1000 years.  Very cool!