UNLIKE IT… Just the other day, Squid was beadily eyeing the Weekly tech dude in a meeting, spurting indignation at a rash of Google Docs hiccups. “What’ll we do if Google goes belly-up with all our documents in the cloud?!” Squid fretted.


IT dude’s response: “Ha! You have nothing to worry about with Google. If they crash it’ll ruin their credibility. It’s Facebook that owns you. Everything you post is theirs!”


Scary. Squid gets it. Perhaps more worrying, though, is something Squid saw on the Weekly Facebook page in response to a pilot database inviting readers to log which establishments follow city bans on the use of polystyrene, aka Styrofoam. 


“I worry about ethnic restaurants,” one commenter writes, “where owners may not understand all the English regulations they are subject [to]… keeping the kitchen clean for health inspection is hard enough… it’s a racist witchhunt on soup cultures.”


Hmmm. Immigrants don’t speaka da English so well, have trouble keeping the kitchen clean, struggle to keep up with local regs, and pretty much serve… soup?


Squid surely doesn’t need to point out the irony here. Anyone capable of running a restaurant – immigrant or not – can understand a simple law requiring that they swap out their Styrofoam packaging materials for eco-friendlier substitutes.


Even scarier than Facebook is the fact that this commenter, who will go unnamed, is working in our public libraries. And once, in a past life as a food writer (it didn’t last), called a quesadilla, for the uninitiated out there, “a Mexican grilled cheese.” 


GREEN FOR GREEN… Squid almost got misty-eyed as save-the-earth advocates spoke out last month to encourage the city of Carmel-by-the-Sea to implement a ban on plastic bags. Ever a supporter of green initiatives, Squid was still cheering when the City Council approved separate proposals last week for solar-powered recycling compactors and an electric-vehicle charging station at Sunset Center. 


Hours before Carmel unanimously approved the $20,000 trash compactor test, the Salinas City Council was busy passing a painful budget with $7.1 million in cuts, a day after the County Board of Supervisors gave the nod to a $31.2 million slash. 


“It’s an expensive test,” Carmel Councilman Ken Talmage acknowledged. Ain’t even a Cadillac trash plan: “This is a Ferrari.” 


There’s no electric Ferrari, but Carmel will go ahead with a $6,250 AMBAG grant for an electric vehicle charging station anyway. Mayor Sue McCloud asked, “If we don’t like it, can we put it in the trash compactor?”