209 Mil: total cost of the Prunedale Improvement Project, which will eliminate left turns across 9 miles of Highway 101. The first interchange, an overpass to Prunedale’s Blackie and Reese roads, open

TEARS OF A CHOWN… Squid can’t believe it’s been almost a whole year since Pacific Grove rich guy Nader Agha launched his vanity paper, Monterey Bay News & Views. From what Squid has seen, Agha makes a good show of playing nice with others. Same can’t be said of Jon Chown. Agha’s editor/publisher/lackey recently left one of Squid’s human colleagues at the Weekly a voicemail so bombastic it had the entire building rolling in the aisles. 


The problem dates back a month or so, when Weekly Distribution Manager Greg Tomascheski asked Chown to stop dropping News & Views in the Weekly’s slot in the wooden Carmel racks built by the Weekly in 1988 and administered by the city’s forester. If the News & Views are in a Weekly spot, Tomascheski moves them. Squid could feel Chown shaking with rage as he said (via voicemail) if Tomascheski put one more finger on a News & Views, he would sue. How to describe his tone? Think the shlub eaten by bears in Grizzly Man meets Robert DeNiro as Al Capone in The Untouchables (“I want his family dead!”).


“I’m thinking we’re probably going to sue both you individually and your employer,” Chown says. “We have problems… You should probably stop throwing my papers away before I own your house and your car and you lose your job.” 


Communications between Tomascheski and Carmel Magazine and even the Pine Cone have gone harmoniously, so Squid can’t imagine why Chowny-Come-Lately would rather muscle him then do the work of establishing his own drop spots. (Also, common sense would help – if Chown met Tomascheski, he’d know it’s dumb to sue someone who doesn’t own much.)


OUT AT SEA… Every year, once Squid’s done watching all the Oscar-nominated films, Squid turns to natural history stuff about fellow sea creatures. Sea Studios, which most recently opted for cute not creepy, trading cephalopods for mammals in feature-length Otter 501, has been a mainstay producer of scientific films with a conservation orientation for 30 years. And for about a quarter century, Executive Director Mark Shelley’s been launching ambitious projects from one of Monterey’s last authentic canneries, a cavernous 1947 structure wedged between the Monterey Bay Aquarium and Doc Ricketts’ lab. 


But now Shelley’s shutting the place down and moving a scaled-down version of the studio to his barn in Jamesburg, where he raises grass-fed beef. So Squid’ll be there alongside fans who can collect their own artifacts Thursday, Jan. 24, from 9am to noon, when Shelley takes a break from hauling loads to Last Chance Mercantile to host a liquidation sale. That’s a wrap.