Squidfry 03.10.22: Rodents On Parade

RODENTS ON PARADE… Squid gets a lot of interesting press releases in Squid’s email inbox. And by “interesting” Squid means weird and pointless. Recently Squid received one such release from RatsOfCalifornia.com, launching a “Campaign To Tackle Growing Public Health Crisis.” It seems rats are now taking over since the shutdown, or so the “experts” behind RatsOfCalifornia.com – namely pest control companies like Clark Pest Control and Orkin – would have Squid believe. The press release came with evil-looking cartoon rats crawling everywhere.

The website promised videos of “rats in strange places” uploaded by members of the public, so Squid clicked the link hoping for things like Pizza Rat transplanted from New York to San Francisco or rats screaming like humans, a la the internet’s beloved screaming goats. (Look it up.) Squid was disappointed to find fewer than a dozen videos of rats in not-so-strange places, like attics and sheds. Meh.

RatsOfCalifornia.com has nothing on @raccoonsofcsumb, the Instagram account that includes photos and videos of random raccoons wandering the CSUMB campus. One post shows a small squad of raccoons climbing in a tree and out of a trash can, with the commentary, “mofos are getting ballsy.”

Squid knows of one sure-fire way for RatsOfCalifornia.com to get attention: Create a rat-head filter and upload an homage to Zoom Cat Lawyer. “I’m here live. I’m not a rat.”

BUT HIS EMAILS!… Speaking of weird and pointless, Squid has a love/hate relationship with watching lawyers drag things out. The firm Lozano Smith, which represents many Monterey County schools, including the Hartnell Community College District, is taking a Salinas citizen to the Court of Appeal because the college did not enjoy losing in Monterey County Superior Court.

The case began when Andrew Sandoval filed a California Public Records Act request for emails belonging to Augustine Nevarez, Hartnell’s director of student affairs. Sandoval was interested in Nevarez’s emails related to a different institution – Oasis Charter School, where he served on the board – so Hartnell claimed the emails were “personal,” and exempt from release. Judge Robert O’Farrell disagreed: “The emails were sent to and from a Hartnell email address, were sent using Hartnell resources and are stored on servers of email accounts Hartnell owns or controls.”

Instead of handing over now-years-old emails, Hartnell filed an appeal on March 4. The gist of their argument is that public employees using public email accounts for private business get to treat those emails as if they are private.

Squid wishes Nevarez just asked a Hartnell student how to set up a gmail account. It would’ve saved him a lot of grief, and Hartnell a lot of money.