Three-Dot Lounge goes cakes, planes and secession

Jill Reilly take care of Cute Cakes business in undated photo/Escondido Grapevine.

True story courtesy of r/DoWeKnowThemPodcaston Reddit:

“My cousin put a deposit for about $700 on a wedding cake through Cute Cake Bakery in Escondido – they had good reviews and cute cakes. Their TikTok is here.

Turns out, they declared bankruptcy about a week later and have been basically ghosting weddings that they promised cake to. They’re also not informing clients that they closed permanently – my cousin had to find out from her wedding planner with less than 8 weeks from the wedding. They refuse to refund her deposit.

Sounds like the bakery may have more of a sordid history based off this reddit post when I was trying to look into the company. I’m pissed af.

Or as Cute Cakes put it on its now defunct website:

Thank You

Cute Cakes operated out of an East Valley Parkway strip mall for years before moving downtown to 345 W Grand Ave., Escondido. The place was overpriced and the management was terrible.

The only surprise is it took this long for them to go away, that is to say late last year. The alleged theft of deposits is no surprise. They were shady as heck. Bye, Felicia (and by that we do NOT mean Felicita Avenue. That’s gonna be around a while.)

La Jolla gets jiggy with it

The Association for the City of La Jolla, an entity as determined as it was vaguely defined, dropped a weighty bundle of 8,000 signatures into the bureaucratic abyss of the San Diego Local Area Formation Commission—mercifully abbreviated as LAFCO—on Wednesday.

This, they were told, was the first official step toward La Jolla wrenching itself free from the clammy grasp of the City of San Diego. Whether it was a step forward, backward, or directly into a procedural tar pit was, as always, a matter of perspective.

And now? Well, now comes the part where things get even more complicated. I spoke with Priscilla Mumpower, LAFCO’s assistant executive officer, who, despite the very official-sounding title, seemed no more certain of how this would unfold than anyone else.

LAFCO, she explained, needed at least 6,800 valid signatures—valid being a wonderfully elastic term in the hands of election officials. To ensure these signatures weren’t the desperate scribbles of overenthusiastic tourists or ambitious children, LAFCO would pass them along to the County Registrar of Voters, who would then perform the sacred and deeply mysterious act of verification.

This, of course, was where everything could—and likely would—go terribly wrong. The Registrar of Voters, no stranger to controversy, was already tangled up in a lawsuit with library and park advocates and the ever-determined San Diego Municipal Employees Association over a failed parcel tax petition.

That effort had floundered on the rocky shores of signature verification, where discrepancies as minor as a misspelled street name or an address written in the wrong format could doom thousands of hopeful autographs to the void.

You might not be able to get there from here

The Embraer 175 jets that American will use at Palomar are quieter than the business jets that operate there now, said San Diego County Supervisor Jim Desmond, a former Delta pilot/Escondido Grapevine

San Diego County, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to open the doors of McLellan-Palomar Airport to American Airlines, and in doing so, has also invited itself into a courtroom. Because when you let big airlines into a small airport, you don’t just get a few extra flights—you get lawsuits, environmental protests, and neighbors suddenly turning into aviation experts overnight.

The local watchdogs at Citizens for a Friendly Airport—who, if nothing else, are persistent—filed their latest legal broadside on January 24, 2025. Their claim? The county skipped over that pesky little thing called the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), rubber-stamping four new flights without bothering to check whether it might actually make life miserable for the people who live near the runway.

Their lawsuit reads like a greatest hits album of legalese: “prejudicial abuse of discretion,” “failure to proceed in the manner required by law,” and “findings not supported by substantial evidence.” In plain English, they’re saying the county shoved this plan through without crossing the necessary t’s and dotting the i’s.

This isn’t their first rodeo. Back in 2018, C4FA took the county to court over an airport master plan update, arguing that noise, traffic, and environmental impacts

Daily commercial flights were set to return to McClellan-Palomar Airport in Carlsbad beginning Feb. 13 under a contract with American Airlines approved unanimously Wednesday by the San Diego County Board of Supervisors.

The people who live near the airport don’t want it. They haven’t wanted it for decades. The planes fly over their houses, rattling windows, waking babies, making sure no one forgets who’s really in charge. So when somebody suggested a two-year lease for American Airlines, they did what they always do. They fought.

On the other side, you had the pilots, the business owners, the people who like the convenience of getting on a plane without driving an hour to do it. They called it progress. They called it good for business.

Then there was the Federal Aviation Administration, which doesn’t care about noise complaints and sleepless nights. What it cares about is contracts. Rules. Money. And Jamie Abbott, the county’s airport boss, laid it out in terms even a politician could understand: Say no to the airline, and the county could lose millions in federal funding. Worse, the FAA could claw back money it already gave.

They had seen it before—Los Angeles, Santa Monica. Courts siding with the FAA. City councils backing down. Last year, Van Nuys Airport tried to shut out a helicopter company over noise complaints. That lasted until the lawyers showed up.

And now, in this county, at this airport, the decision loomed. The board’s acting chair, Terra Lawson-Remer, put it plainly:

“I feel we basically have a gun to our heads.”

She wasn’t wrong. The only question left was who was going to pull the trigger.

We have considered a few outstanding three-dot items stripped from below, well below, today’s sundry headlines. But lastly, and not leastly, a reminder and salute to he who pioneered the three-dot lounge way…

Herb Caen at his office, Dec. 31, 1993/Nancy Wong

It’s been over 25 years since famed San Francisco journalist Herb Caen (1916-1997) died. For journalists and San Franciscans, Caen was a superstar. Known as “Mr. San Francisco,” his columns were a vital piece in the mosaic of one of the world’s great cities.

Caen wrote a column six days a week from July 5, 1938 until 1991 when he cut back to five days a week, then three, before dying in 1997 at age 80. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1996 for lifetime achievement. A special Herb Caen day in The City in 1996 drew 75,000 enthusiastic fans to honor him at City Hall.

Mr. San Francisco was a master of what came to be called “Three-Dot Journalism.” He threw everything from one-liners, gossip, anecdotes and information into this format that became a journalistic staple in the 1930s and 1940s.

There was a method to the madness of presenting San Francisco legend Herb Caen’s three-dot lounge history along with its various re-interpretations. That was to set up Escondido Grapevine’s own three-dot lounge approach to local news. For more about the concept, visit our story here. For more local three-dot news, keep on trucking…and support The Grapevine, otherwise we won’t post the likes of this again. send your donations to us via Paypal at this link.