IN THE FLOW… After an exhausting trip to the calamari debacle on the wharf (see second item), Squid oozed back to the lair and hunkered down with a bowl of shrimp-flavored popcorn and a 38-page epic tale of despair, corruption and water: The Monterey County Superior Court Case of Stephen Phillip Collins vs. the County of Monterey and the Monterey County Board of Supervisors. Filed “pro se,” which is Latin for “I can’t afford an attorney,” Collins suit lays out his story of how it was, exactly, he came to be raking in bucks as a Regional Desalination Project contractor while repping the county as a Monterey County Water Resources Agency board member: Supervisor Lou Calcagno didn’t think ex-agency chief Curtis Weeks could run the ball past the goal line, and Supervisor Dave Potter agreed. That made Squid wonder: What happened to Weeks anyway? It appears he’s made a comfy home as a senior consultant at Cardno ENTRIX. In ’09, the unfortunately named outfit prepared the initial study for the Salinas River Channel Maintenance Program. That doc was rejected, though, and the agency ordered up a Environmental Impact Report. The cost of the EIR is supposed to run about $585,000. And guess who’s writing it? Cardno ENTRIX. 


No word if Weeks is working on it, but isn’t it great when bureaucrats land on their feet and enviro companies are allowed a second chance too? Collins, meanwhile, says the supes have made it impossible for him to earn a living, and he’s hoping to teach them a $25 million lesson.


VIVA LA SQUID… Important Squid facts: Squid has a lot of heart – three chambers worth, in fact – and Squid does eat other squid.


Squid is not proud of the latter fact, but hey: Sometimes you gotta take a bite out of your fellow being. But Squid is proud to call Monterey Bay home, and that means Squid’s rather large, cannibalistic heart beats for its definitive foods: calamari and clam chowder. 


So locals who found the first-ever Great Calamari and Clam Chowder Festival tasteless are not alone. Squid too thought “Great” might be revised to “Almost Un-Passable Calamari and Clam Chowder Festival,” that things were overpriced (even for a free-music festival) and that chowder shouldn’t evoke so many comments involving the word “milk.” Maybe the Central Valley tourists were fooled, but for any Sea God-fearing local, this was not fishy fare to be proud of.


Squid’s take: Last week Squid’s colleague celebrated co-organizer Chris Shake’s sustainable chops after he earned an Aquarium Seafood Heroes award. Shake would do well to import some of that progressive thinking to create a less dumbed down, mass-cooked event. And that’s from the heart.