DAM TAASTY… Squid likes metaphors, especially when they sauce-up a dry cracker such as a resource management proposal. So Squid got droolly over the PLANNING AND CONSERVATION LEAGUE’s Insider newsletter for its “latest culinary masterpiece”— the “hot from the oven” Supplemental Carmel River Watershed Action Plan. The authors generously pour the “hot Carmel sundae” metaphor onto the “tasty” river restoration proposal, whose main ingredients are the removal of the San Clemente Dam and a reduction in water diversions. Squid has a hard time imagining a sundae hot from the oven, or fresh from the river, but Squid’ll try anything, especially if it involves steelhead trout and red-legged frogs. Squid loves frog legs. Drizzled with Carmel.

GO! BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD… Squid often secretly reads the Monterey County Herald’s GO! for entertainment— just not for the kind of entertainment GO!’s editors likely intend. All by themselves, the photos in the Thursday pull-out are a weekly safari into the blurry and the strangely altered. Last week’s cover was just one recent example, with loveable Big Sur resident AL JARDINE getting the Photoshop shaft: His cut-out is a rough-edged, low-resolution ghoul next to BRIAN WILSON’s far clearer original picture.

As mentioned, though, Squid is a metaphor-loving mollusk, so Squid’s greatest entertainment comes from the writing itself, like some found in the same issue. This, from a theater story about ALLSTON JAMES’ Foreign Women— in the lead sentence, no less: “Desperate circumstances have a way of churning people about and spitting them out, at which time they tend to harden, crumble or sail away on higher ground than they began.”

Ah, metaphors more mixed than Kool-Aid at a cross-dresser party— Squid just can’t get entertainment like that anywhere else. It just has a way of lifting Squid’s emotions until Squid is higher than a pie in the sky that is a little slice of heaven.

ACTING OUT… Squid’s sure that KARL ROVE would be proud to hear that Gov. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER borrowed a page from Rove’s playbook, faking populist democracy by holding an invitation-only “TOWN HALL MEETING.” This is a publicity stunt, at best, designed to show friendly faces lobbing tightly-scripted questions vetted by flaks beforehand.

And so it was, last week, when Schwarzenegger visited Monterey. “I love people,” he told the crowd. “I love being out with people. When I was a body builder, I went out with the people. Let them ask questions.” And when he was an actor, he memorized his lines and repeated them in front of the camera.