The big news in town this week with a lot of my friends, especially the ones from the Midwest and East Coast, is that a Five Guys Burger And Fries shop has opened in San Diego. It apparently opened about three weeks ago, but the reason why it was not really discovered until this week with my friends is because this first location in San Diego is tucked away in the food court of Naval Air Station North Island in Coronado. They aren’t advertising to the public because it’s on a military base and as a member of the general public you can’t just go on to a military base just because you want to try their new burger joint. You need someone with a Department of Defense sticker on their vehicle to get access to the base.

I wasn’t originally planning on heading out yesterday, but needed to head down to the county courthouse for some information and saw that one of my local friends, Dan Baggett, was planning on going and was looking to see if anyone wanted to join him. He said his friend Jack was going to join him and I decided I would meet up with them so that we could ride over to the base and check it out. It definitely sounded like a must try event since my other friend Joe Gray has posted to his Facebook account that he’s already been there twice in less than 48 hours and that in June when he was in Tennessee he went to a Five Guys three days in a row for lunch. So with that kind of recommendation, I had to check it out.

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When I was asked to join Jorge Cruise’s Belly Fat Cure 12 week program, Kim, my main contact within Jorge Cruise’s group, asked me for an update on my progress and I put together this photo which merges a picture of me from a year ago, when I met Arrival, one of the world’s best ABBA tribute bands in Los Angeles, with this photo of me from my trip to New York last month, I felt the photos had similar enough poses to show the dramatic difference in how I looked then compared to how I look now.

I am really pleased to see the difference myself as sometimes I don’t always see it. I see myself daily in the mirror and so I don’t always notice the difference myself. The Belly Fat Cure has definitely been the best experience I’ve had this year. As I plan to continue the plan for life, I am sure I will continue to lose weight. I have a number of people ask what my final goal weight is and my answer is, I keep going until the weight stops coming off, then I’ll just maintain it.

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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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You might be asking since when does United Airlines serve Which Wich? sandwiches on their flights. How on Earth would they be able to customize a “hot wich” mid flight? Unfortunately, that’s not (yet) a service they offer. I can just imagine a flight where every seat back is equipped with a Which Wich? bag, and a red Sharpie for passengers to check a page in the flight magazine to write out the basic type of sandwich they want and then use the bag’s check boxes to further customize the rest of the bag and write on a seat number instead of a name so that an inflight Which Wich? attendant could prepare the sandwiches and have them delivered hot and fresh to passengers in flight, but unfortunately that’s just a dream at this point.

In the era of airlines trying to nickel and dime their passengers for all the formerly included services, such as food offerings on cross country flights, the good thing is they allow you to bring your own food on board. So which airport offers Which Wich? in the terminal? Well none in California at the moment. How I got a Which Wich? sandwich on board my red eye flight from Los Angeles International (LAX) to Washington, D.C.’s Dulles International Airport (IAD) was stopping at the Which Wich store in Carlsbad, California where I had bought two sandwiches, one to enjoy hot and fresh there in the restaurant and the other to take with me on my flights.

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Later today I will be boarding a couple of flights that will take me to New York City. My flights are “Red Eye” flights that will deliver me to New York first thing tomorrow morning. I’m excited to be seeing the new English translation of the epic musical, Kristina, written by ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson. The show is based on Vilhelm Moberg’s epic novels in “The Emmigrants” series which chronicles the adventures of Swede Karl Oskar and his wife Kristina as they move their family from famine stricken Sweden to the wild’s of America in the late 1800′s.

Kristina is not being staged as a complete show, it is being staged in a concert style at the famed Carnegie Hall. The purpose of which is to record the show as well as gauge the reaction to it to see if there’d be interest in a fully staged version. The original Swedish epic was a definitely considered an epic masterpiece by those who saw it, but at a four hour running time, is going to have to undergo some trimming if its ever going to be staged fully here in the United States. The concerts will be a good indication of where some of the trimming has been done.

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As I’ve started to become proficient in making sugar-free alternatives for desserts that are compliant with Jorge Cruise’s Belly Fat Cure program, one of the challenges I’ve had in mind that I wanted to attempt for myself was to make an as close to sugar-free as possible Black Forest cake for my birthday. Not any of the fancy Black Forest cakes made with Cherry liquor or several fancy layers as those to me aren’t Black Forest cakes to me. For me, I tend to like the plain ol’ neighborhood supermarket variety of Black Forest cakes.

The reason I love these kinds of Black Forest cake is because it was always something special my grandmother would get from her local SuperValu Grocery store back in Calgary, Canada when I was a kid. She would do this especially for me when I would come to stay with her or at least that’s what she would tell me. Its not so much that the cake was anything special in itself, just the memories of time with my grandmother where she would make me feel like I was the most important person in the world and we were getting to enjoy a special treat together. I miss my grandmother since she passed away at the end of 2001, so I generally like to celebrate my birthdays with a Black Forest cake to not only celebrate my birthday but to feel like I’m still having a special moment with my grandmother.

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The touring cast of Wicked is in San Diego at the Civic Theatre this month and I had the opportunity to catch the show for a Sunday Matinee performance. A lot of friends have been very surprised that I haven’t yet seen the show as they know I like to see a lot of shows and usually stay pretty current on the top shows. And despite the long run the show had in Los Angeles, I hadn’t seen it yet. So I made sure to catch it this time around.

Did I love the show? No. Did I hate the show? No. Did I enjoy the show? Yes. Would I see it again? Maybe. So what did I think? Well, let’s just say I never thought it would be possible to like a show that I didn’t particularly care for the songs. I enjoyed the story and the visually stunning presentation of the show, but musically, I just wasn’t really connecting with the music on any level. Despite having owned the cast album for several years now, the only songs I really knew were “Popular” and “Defying Gravity” so I was a little disappointed both were in the first act. I was also fighting off the urge to fall asleep during a couple of really boring songs in the first act like “Dancing Through Life.”

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One of my favorite local bands, Roxy Monoxide, announced they were going to have a pre-release party for the CD entitled “Another Day, Another Episode” at San Diego’s Beauty Bar located near the intersection of El Cajon Blvd. and Euclid Ave.

Having never been to the Beauty Bar, I looked them up online and comes to find out they are a chain of locations with Beauty Bar’s in a variety of cities, including Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Austin, and Brooklyn. They seem to have quite the concept. In style reminiscent of a 1950′s or 1960′s style beauty salon, it’s a full service bar. Think “Beauty School Dropout” from Grease crossed with alcohol and you’ll get the idea. Go to the bar and get your martini and sit under an old style salon hair dryer. Let’s just say, the B-52′s would never look out of place here. (Check out the photos of the venue here.)

San Diego’s Beauty Bar consists of a main bar area and a tented performance space in behind the bar that is connected via a roll door. It definitely wasn’t the most modern looking venue, but I liked the them of it. You have to appreciate the double meaning of calling the place the Beauty Bar, as it was certainly a bar in the alcohol sense of the world, and wouldn’t have been out of place with bar as in bar of soap. Personally I’m surprised the venue isn’t in Hillcrest.

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