Yes.

wtf kind of weird query language is that? Fuzzy logic on an equal sign operator? Blasphemy.
The more I look at this the weirder I feel like it is. Where did you even scrape this 'region' data? I find it hard to believe that it's just a remapped field name from the 'Location' field on users BL forum profiles, it would make no sense to rename the field. Is this scraped from geo IP lookups from BL connections to your server, making it an irrelevant answer to the question? And what kind of front-end interface is that? Is it a forgetin' ruby interpreter or what?