SQUIDFRY 11.26.20: Spellchec

SPELLCHEC… Squid normally waits until after Thanksgiving to decorate for the Christmas-Festivus holiday, but times being what they are – 2020! – Squid spent last weekend doing early hall decking. Squid wrapped a new Festivus pole in colorful crepe paper. Then Squid started making a list of gifts to give, going by the old formula handed down through generations of cephalopod: “Something you want, something you need, something to wear, something to read.”

Squid loves great literature, and both needs and wants it. So Squid started making a list of books for the family’s Secret Santa: Joanna Arenina, by the great Ted Dostoyevski. And the Sun Also Sets, by Oscar Hemingway. And…

Wait, you mean those aren’t legitimate books by legitimate authors? Squid’s confused – and has been ever since an excursion to Oldtown Salinas, err, Salinas City Center, per the new signage – to buy crepe paper. As the remaking of the city’s Main Street continues, the two new, permanent signs went up pointing out places for visitors to go: Dining this way! Parking that way! The Steinbec Center that way too!

That’s right. In a city made famous by the Nobel Prize-winning author John Steinbeck – that’s Steinbeck with a K – the city managed to create two metal signs, print the signs and put up the signs without anyone noticing the misspelling.

Now where did Squid leave Squid’s copies of Tortilla Fluffy and The Pink Pony?

NOT-SO-TOTAL RECALL… In between the faux fiction, Squid has been catching up on ancient Greek mythology, because it feels more believable than most of 2020. As a multi-tentacled cephalopod, Squid has been especially taken with the multi-headed Hydra, kind of like Squid’s evil cousin.

Maybe Pastor Ronald Britt, architect of an effort to recall City Councilmember Jon Wizard, has been reading mythology too. “There should be one vision in this city, not five,” Britt says. “If everyone on the council has their own vision, that’s like a five-headed monster.”

Sounds to Squid more like a five-member elected body operating as a five-member elected body. But Squid watched anyway as a deadline came and went: Nov. 10, the date by which Seaside’s Committee for Recalling Jon Wizard had to submit 2,767 voter signatures to put a recall on the ballot. (It would have been a special election; they’d already missed a deadline to get a recall on the Nov. 3 ballot.)

On Nov. 14, the committee announced they were suspending the recall campaign. Britt claims this was his plan all along: “My strategy was not to take his seat, but really to make him have to worry.”

Squid hopes they manage to work together. But that might be too unbelievable even for mythology – Squid hasn’t seen that kind of story told anywhere.