The kind folks at Cumberland Packaging, the makers of Sugar In The Raw, sent me some samples of the Stevia Extract In The Raw product. As someone who’s been on Jorge Cruise’s Belly Fat Cure program since April, I’ve been actively replacing sugar with a lot of alternative products, such as Truvia, and PureVia.

One of the big challenges is trying to find good natural substitutes for sugar, unlike the popular “packet” type sugar alternatives you usually find offered everywhere such as saccharin, aspartame, and sucralose all of which are toxic man-made chemicals. Stevia is a great alternative but I’ve only tried it when it’s blended with a sugar alcohol such Erythritol, as is in the case of both Truvia and PureVia. Those brands say that they combine the sugar alcohol with the stevia to help remove the bitterness of plain stevia. So I was a bit hesitant to try plain stevia.

So when I saw the opportunity to have the makers of Stevia Extract In The Raw to send me some samples, I thought it was a great opportunity to do so. I was following them on Twitter and they were offering samples to their Twitter followers. They saw on my profile that I am a bit of a blackjack expert so they asked me a blackjack question before sending me the samples.

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One of the previews shown during last week’s “Mommie Dearest” screening was that their December movie of the month is their FilmOut monthly film series would be “Xanadu.” While “Xanadu” is considered one of the worst movies ever made, depending on who you ask. I happen to love the movie.

I’ve been an Olivia Newton-John fan for as long as I can remember and I’ve always had a soft spot for the movie. And when the Broadway musical version of “Xanadu” was here in San Diego last year, I had to bust out the movie version a number of times to enjoy it yet again. I’ve never actually seen the movie on the big screen so this will be an exciting night for me. To give you an idea of how much of a fan I am of this movie, I have the movie on VHS, Laserdisc, two different DVD releases, and the original soundtrack on vinyl, as well as three copies of it on CD. (The first was a cheap Australian release, the second was when it was finally released in the US with a really nice job done on the liner notes, and the third copy is because it was included for free with the latest DVD version.) And as for the stage show, I saw it eight times when it was here at the La Jolla Playhouse. And I am looking forward to it coming to Orange County later this year too.

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I know this review is a bit late and I still need to get to my reviews of the “Kristina” shows from Carnegie Hall, but I’m trying to fit in the time when I can. So apologies to my readers anxiously anticipating my reviews.

I wasn’t expecting my chance to see Kylie Minogue in person to be such a last minute affair, but I had been hoping my new Blackjack Training program I am I developing would not only be released long before this concert, but it would also help brining in the funds to purchase much better seats for the show. But as the concert has come and past and the project is still not yet ready to launch, I ended up scrambling last minute to make sure I had the night of October 4th off work, and purchased some tickets. I decided I wasn’t that fussed about having great seats, as I felt it was just more important to be there. So I bought a couple of the cheapest tickets available so my good friend Rod Reynolds and I could see the Australian pop diva bring her first ever United States tour. I didn’t know it at the time I bought the tickets but they were second row seats……second row from the back.

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When I first met Jorge Cruise in April, one of the things I said to him was that one of my goals when I joined his Belly Fat Cure program was to be able to get on one of the smaller commuter planes and be able to latch my seat belt without having it stretched out to it’s widest point and still having to suck in my gut or contorting myself in such a way so that I could just get the belt latched. The reason why this is was a goal for me is because those 30 seater commuter planes have shorter seat belts than the ones you find in the bigger jet planes.

What I didn’t tell Jorge was one time I had to suffer the embarrassment of having to ask for a seat belt extension from the flight attendant one time because no matter how much I tried to suck in my gut, I still couldn’t get the seat belt latched when a few days before I was able to successfully do it. The flight attendant made no big deal about it but I was absolutely crushed and shamed. And if it wasn’t for the fact there were people around me that could see me, I probably would have shed a few tears over it at that moment too. I was extremely embarrassed by it.

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Unlike Jonathan Swift’s satirical essay entitled “A Modest Proposal” that suggest the Irish should sell their children to rich people as food, my modest proposal is a thought on how to improve Indian Gaming especially here in San Diego county. What I view as a big problem for Indian Gaming here is that the reservations are on land that is pretty much in the middle of nowhere and in a lot of cases have fairly treacherous roads to get to them, and all the casinos are spread out way too far apart from each other to be a real draw.

The proposal I am suggesting is that the tribes should get together, and select one of the reservations that is either centrally located within the county or one that is easy to get to and in exchange for land or revenue from the other tribes, allow the other local tribes ownership rights to a section of the land in order to build their resort casinos. Essentially allowing for all the local Indian tribes to set up their casinos in one location and create a San Diego version of the Las Vegas strip. With all the local Indian casinos in a single location, it would create the ultimate Southern California gaming destination.

The benefit of a San Diego Strip of Indian Gaming casinos is that it would eliminate the problems of having horrible winding roads to get to the casinos. The reason being is that with ten current gaming tribes in San Diego county putting all their casinos in one place, between the ten of them, they could afford to create a set of large and safe roadways in and out of the strip area. The amount of effort to police the casinos could be consolidated, plus it would easier to market the casinos as all it would be easy to just advertise each casino as being part of the San Diego strip.

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Tonight I met up for dinner with my good friend Vito Grandolfo, before we attended a screening of the classic campy film, “Mommie Dearest” starring Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford. The screening was part of the local FilmOut monthly movie series at the Birch North Park Theatre in North Park. Vito and I met up with some friends who were also planning to see the show. It seemed like a good and fun idea to go see a wickedly bad movie that definitely inspired some audience participation as fans of the movie shouted out some of the biggest lines from the movie back at the screen.

I had never been to the Birch North Park Theatre before. It was a nice venue for one as old as it is. It wasn’t too large and wasn’t too small either. It looks like the venue is able to be used for stage productions as well, tonight there just happened to be a huge screen parked on the stage. Before the movie began they did a raffle for a few prizes and even awarded one for someone who had come dressed as Joan Crawford. Additionally the screening had Billy Masters as an opening act. He came, shared some stories about the movie, how Faye Dunaway thinks the movie killed her career, and gave away some prizes. I’m not entirely sure who he is, but he was moderately entertaining. He said to watch out for his favorite part in the movie which occurs during the infamous wire hanger scene and the cleaning powder where Faye goes cross-eyed for a moment.

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Surprisingly, I’ve never actually seen either “Toy Story” movie before. And oddly enough, I actually do have both movies on DVD. I picked up the first Toy Story movie when it was reissued as a 10th Anniversary edition, and the second one either at the same time or shortly thereafter. But I’m guessing it might have been a buy both get a better discount kind of deal. But both DVDs are still shrinkwrapped to this day. I know the first one at least had to have been good based on the fact it spawned a sequel, but it also launched Pixar into the mainstream and I have enjoyed several of their movies over the years.

I don’t know why this seems to be true for me, but I never seem to find the Pixar movie trailers interesting enough to ever want to see the movies when they happen to be playing on the big screen. I had never seen any of them on the big screen, not “Monster’s Inc.”, not “Finding Nemo”, not “Cars” not even “Wall-E” or this year’s “Up” and yet, ultimately I’ve been told how great and wonderful they are, and I’ve checked them out on DVD and ended up buying them. I will probably even get “Up” when it comes out next month. All of the ones I’ve seen ended up being extremely good, so I just don’t quite get why their trailers strike me as lame and I don’t see them in the theaters.

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My mom is an avid fan of QVC and about a month ago, I somehow ended up on QVC’s website and one of the items that popped up to look at was a Sugar Free Chocolate Mousse Cake from Junior’s Cheesecakes of New York. I ended up clicking on it just to check it out and it looked amazingly good. There were endless reviews of how wonderful the cake was, so I was intrigued. I saw they also had a Sugar Free Cheesecake listed that also was highly reviewed. As I am on a low sugar program I thought it might be worth trying one of these, but I was a bit hesitant to spend $30-$35 plus another $11 for shipping for a whole cake and QVC also charges tax, so a few more dollars on top of it for something I haven’t tried. Plus that’s a huge chunk of money for a single cake.

Well since I had an upcoming trip to New York, I decided I was going to wait on these expensive cakes and take advantage of the fact Junior’s has restaurants in New York and hunt one of the restaurants down while in New York and try a slice of their cheesecake. I looked up Junior’s website and found they have several restaurants in the New York area and it looked like for my visit to New York, my best option was to find the one in Times Square, so I added it to my agenda for New York.

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I recently ran out of the Dial Antibacterial Hand Soap I had in the last refill container I bought and recently ended up at the store to buy some more and what did I find? Dial in these pouch bags instead of refill jars. The go so far as to call it an “Eco-Smart Refill” package and print a tree image to sell you on the idea that it’s better for the environment.

It seems to me that this Eco-friendliness of this packaging is complete crap. The old packaging could be recycled and there’s no labeling on the new pouch to indicate it can be recycled at all. The benefits that it prints on the package say that it contains 67% less plastic and requires 86% less materials, transportation, and fuel. How they come up with the 86% figure is not mentioned but it seems to me that it’s missing the whole point. The only benefit I can see is that for the company it saves them money on their bottom line because it costs them less to produce packaging that uses less plastic, but by no longer being recyclable it’s now bad for the environment because it takes landfill space. The packaging does say that it takes “significantly smaller impact on landfills” but that’s assuming people were throwing out the old packaging instead of recycling it.

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When I recently stopped at Major Market in Escondido to check their prices on some flavored extracts for my sugar-free Nanaimo Bars, I took the opportunity to browse the whole store. Major Market carries a lot of International foods and they carry a large selection of British foods. It also happens to be where I has previously purchased the Bird’s Custard Powder that is an essential ingredient for my sugar free Nanaimo Bar recipe. I happened to browse the frozen food section and saw they had some bags of imported Aunt Bessie’s Frozen Yorkshire Pudding.

I’ve only had Yorkshire Pudding one time in my life and that was in the home of my good friends Sara and Paul Russell when I spent a week in the United Kingdom in 2006. I thought they were amazing and I really liked them. But I’ve not had them since. Seeing the bag of Yorkshire Pudding in the store, reminded me of those tasty Yorkshire Pudding pastries that Sara had made during my visit. While looking at the bag in the store, I decided to use my cell phone and look up recipes for Yorkshire pudding to see if it was going to be easy to make or if I should just buy the overpriced bag of imported frozen ones.

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