If you’re a fan of the rebooted Doctor Who that’s had Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant in the title role, then Amazon has a great deal for you, but you have to act now, because the deal is for today only!! If you’re like me and previously though the DVD sets from the BBC are considerably overpriced, then today is your day!

Amazon has the box sets for each of the four seasons of the show on sale today for $32.49 a piece. That’s 59% off the list price of $79.99 and 50% off of Amazon’s regular price of $64.99. I’ve been hesitant to buy the sets myself because quite frankly I felt they were a complete rip off at their regular price. The show has been remarkably good and I definitely wanted the sets but I’m sorry $65 to $80 a set was way too much money in my opinion for a show that only does 13 episodes a season. Maybe if they were 26 episode seasons like most American shows, it would be a reasonable price, but for 13 episodes, forget it. So for literally half price today only at Amazon, the sets are actually affordable.

The show is brilliant and well written and getting all four sets is truly the best option if you’ve never seen it. The way the show ends in the fourth season ties back to the entire series in such a well thought out way that you get the feeling the ending was always in mind when they established the series. Few shows pay off and spread out the storyline over so many seasons that you’re going to be amazed and wish American shows would do this. Lost may eventually pay off in this way, but we won’t know for sure until the final season completes it.

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Last night I attended another “Economy DVD Night” get together at the apartment shared by my friends Mike Yada and Jeffrey “J.P.” Pohlmann. About 15 of us or so showed up for the get together. The movie of the evening was “Auntie Mame” starring Rosalind Russell, the 1958 film based the original stage play, not the 1974 movie musical version entitled “Mame.”

I’ve not seen either film before, but apparently the musical version on film is referred to as an abomination by one of our hosts of the evening and the movie was not allowed to be mentioned. Apparently that’s due to Lucille Ball in the title role. Despite the ban on the subject, following the movie we viewed the trailers for both films as they were both on the DVD as extras. It was discussed that the musical version definitely had some good songs and of course, Bea Arthur. Maybe if they had gotten Angela Landsbury from the Original Broadway cast of the musical version it wouldn’t have been so derided. I have the Original Broadway cast album for it, and I quite like the banter between Angela and Bea. Might just have to give it a rent to see how bad it really is.

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I’ve been checking out some of the Sirius XM Satellite Radio stations I’ve never really checked out thanks to their new iPhone app which means I now have a radio on me all the time instead of my Sirius Stiletto radio which I leave at home so it will record the early morning programs that I want to listen to that are on while I’m at work. One of the stations I’ve been enjoying lately is the Raw Dog comedy channel.

On the talk stations I usually listen to the commercials are all the same kind so I was under the impression that commercials are pretty much the same on all the talk channels, but I encountered a commercial that I thought was a fake comedy commercial but turns out to be a legitimate commercial. It was for a website called “Cougar Life” an online dating portal for older women who want younger men. So the ad was soliciting men to sign up for these sexually mad cougars to ravage them. I was laughing at the commercial because I thought it was fake. So imagine my surprise when Google actually results for Cougar Life and links to multiple pages on their site, and short of signing up for it (as I’m not interested in the site) I checked it out.

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I was introduced to Aunt Gussie’s Sugar Free Cookies when I was in New York in September. There was a huge display of them at the Whole Foods Market on 7th Avenue. I decided to buy a package of the cookies and I opted for the Spelt Sugar Free Chocolate Chip ones and found them to be quite good. Spelt is a wheat alternative that’s high in fiber and allows nutrients to be absorbed more quickly than traditional wheat.

Before heading home from New York, I looked up Aunt Gussie’s website and used the store locater option to see if there were any stores in the San Diego area that carried the cookies. According to the website, both Whole Foods Markets in San Diego carry them, so I figured it would be easy to find some more at home. Not quite the case, I visited both San Diego locations, I spent an hour at the Hillcrest location trying to find the cookies, no luck at all. The La Jolla location carried a couple of varieties, but not ones I wanted, certainly no match for the large section of them the New York location had, no doubt due to the fact the company is based in New Jersey, so it’s pretty much local to New York.

I ended up finding them at my local Jimbo’s Naturally. The local 4S Ranch location in Rancho Bernardo had two spots on the shelf for them, one was sold out which I’m guessing was the sugar free chocolate chip cookies and the other was the sugar free biscotti style cookies. I didn’t but those. I was told the Escondido location definitely had the sugar free chocolate chip cookies and I had to stop in Escondido today so I stopped by there. Sure enough they had the Sugar Free chocolate chip cookies, except these were the Sugar Free Chocolate Chip cookies with Almonds. Not exactly what I wanted, but I’m okay with Almonds so I bought a package. Very good!!

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When McDonald’s started selling Angus One-Third Pound Burgers, it took a page from West Coast burger chain, Carl’s Jr, which introduced sit-down restaurant style burgers a few years ago under the name “The Six Dollar Burger” which they were selling for $3.99. So in response to McDonald’s introduction of similar premium burgers, Carl’s Jr decided to take on McDonald’s head on by introducing their own version of the Big Mac called “The Big Carl.”

The Big Carl takes on the Big Mac, blatantly with a lot of the advertising for it offering side by side comparisons to the Big Mac, some done humorously as if the burgers were talking to each other (think the Apple commercials with Mac vs. Windows except instead of two actors, it’s just closeups of the burgers with voiceovers.) And others use Carl’s Jr.’s more signature sarcastically toned humor as seen in the commercial below which compares the burgers with a take on the old Big Mac song. I particularly like Carl’s more sarcastically toned commercials ever since they introduced a campaign showcasing a guy looking clueless in a supermarket with the slogan, “Without us, some guys would starve.”

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I had actually rented from Netflix James Arthur Ray’s DVD called “Harmonic Wealth” at the end of July prior to the tragedy of a few people dying in a sweat lodge in Sedona at one of his events. I did not rent it out of any morbid curiosity, but rather I quite enjoy “The Secret” and I had actually attended an event here in San Diego where James Ray was pitching his Harmonic Wealth program.

However, the DVD sat in my pile untouched until about a week ago. For some reason I’ve just not been able to bring myself to put it in the DVD player and watch it. And when I finally did, I just watched about twenty minutes of it before I turned it off, then a couple days later resumed where I left off, paused again for another couple days and then finally finishing it off today. I just couldn’t do it in one sitting.

I think part of it is due to the fact that following the event I wanted to say hello to James Ray and give him a copy of a mix CD I made of songs that have a “Law Of Attraction” feel about them. I wanted to present a copy of it to James Ray as a thank you for the inspiration I got from his segments in “The Secret.” And when I finally got my opportunity to present it to him, he quickly handed it off to his assistant and asked me if I was going to come to one of his Harmonic Wealth weekends and I said that would not be able to do it at this time, he had absolutely no interest in me or my presenting him with a sign of my gratitude.

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The city of Poway just had a grand opening for a 99 Cents Only store within the last week. Naturally because it’s new in town I decided to check it out. However, one of the things I noticed that wasn’t blatantly obvious was a sign indicating that due to inflation, prices were now no longer 99 cents, but rather 99.99 cents. This carrying out the nines to two more decimal places essentially transforms the prices into $1.00 per item and you’d have to actually purchase 51 ones before you get one at 99 cents.

To me, this reeks of false advertising. The stores are called 99 Cents Only stores, and they’re flat out lying. The business was built on the premise that nothing in the stores would cost more than 99 cents. And according to their press release about the change, they managed to keep that true for slightly more than twenty-five years since the company was founded in 1982 until they opted to change it in late 2008. I’m not sure if they were the first company to start on the premise of charging 99 cents, but obviously others followed but decided to go for the dollar instead of losing an additional penny per item. This price increase does effectively make the 99 cent stores the same as the dollar stores, except for the fact they’ve got that problem that their name specifically states 99 Cents “Only.”

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In one of those the truth is so strange it sounds like fiction moments, I was listening to Mary Occhino on my Sirius Satellite Radio because I woke up fairly early this morning. Her show now airs here in California between 4 am and 7 am due to the recent addition of Rosie O’Donnell to the Sirius XM Stars channel lineup. I decided to give Rosie O’Donnell’s program a try and stayed listening to her show.

During the Rosie Radio show, she was discussing how she and her daughter are addicted to one of the coffee style drinks at Dunkin’ Donuts. So I ended up checking out Dunkin’ Donuts webpage and on a long shot checked to see if any were in town. And it came up with no results. But a Google search yielded some different results, and so I ended up on Yelp.com where some local reviewers of some local donut shop were reminiscing about how that particular shop used to be Dunkin’ Donuts at one point in time. On the right hand side of the page was a Canadian Maple Leaf that caught my eye. Naturally as a Canadian, I had to see why there was a Canadian Maple Leaf on this page of reviews for a local donut shop that used to be a Dunkin’ Donuts however many years ago.

The Maple Leaf image was basically being used as a profile picture and it was tied to a list called “Comfort Foods” that was under a header called “Related Lists.” So whoever this person is had prepared a list of locations on Yelp, that he or she felt were great comfort food locations in San Diego, so out of curiosity, I clicked on because I’m assuming that he or she is also Canadian like me, so maybe they would have similar tastes.

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If you’re in the market for a witty greeting card, you may want to try a card from Smart Alex, Inc. I came across a small selection of their cards in a local shop here in San Diego, and I wasn’t even intending to purchase cards that day, but ended up leaving with the perfect card for an upcoming birthday for a friend.

As illustrated by the image with this blog entry, I was highly amused by the card depicting a box fan and a vacuum cleaner with the fan taunting the vacuum with “You Suck” and the vacuum responding “Blow Me.” I literally laughed out lout at the sight of that card and had to have it for a friend of mine. The inside of the card read “Happy Birthday from your biggest fan. Hope your presents don’t suck.”

They had several other great cards in the shop, all of them just a little bit edgy and borderline risqué, all of which appeal to my wicked sense of humor. Probably my next favorite card features some older ladies at a card table in a retirement community. One says to other, “They say women outlive men.” The other lady replies, “So that’s why there’s no men around here? I thought I was in the lesbian lounge.” Click here to see the card.

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Last night in Jorge Cruise‘s weekly video for the 12 week coaching plan for the Belly Fat Cure, Jorge spent a bit of time addressing the issue of emotional eating. This topic came up through a question from a program member.

Jorge stressed that when eating is a result of trying to fill an emotional needed, the nutrition of the food isn’t going to matter because the emotional need isn’t being met. So even if the food is the correct nutrition, eating while feeling highly emotional isn’t going to produce a satiated feeling that helps the brain know when to tell the body to stop eating. You become at risk of over eating when trying to eat while feeling angry, sad, depressed, anxious, stressed out, and more.

It’s best to try and calm down or try to neutralize the highly emotional state before sitting down to a meal. Maybe find some funny video clips on YouTube or download a comedy podcast from iTunes, just do something to change your state of mind so that when you do eat, you’re coming from a place where you will feel full from the meal. (more…)

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