Squidfry: #NewPeninsula?

#NEWPENINSULA?… Squid nearly choked on Squid’s shrimp popcorn March 22 when local impresario/fashion guru Maddox Haberdasher, in a Facebook post, announced he was running for mayor of tiny Sand City. So far as Squid knew, Haberdasher lived in Monterey, though he told Squid’s colleague that day he is building a house in Sand City, and had just secured a lease for a rental until it’s done. He also said, “This is my destiny. I think this is why I came to California.”

Haberdasher could hardly be more different than longtime, soon-to-retire Mayor David Pendergrass – the latter wears bolo ties, the former wears every kind of tie but bolos. Over the course of the next week, the Facebook posts kept coming: “Men will come and go. Legacy is immortal. The future is now! #Maddox2018”; “I believe in my destiny. #Maddox2018”; “All good things. #Maddox2018 #InPursuit”; “Some people hope their dreams will come true. Some people stalk their dreams like prey. #InPursuit”; “Plan the work and then work the plan. #MayorMaddox.” You get the idea.

Haberdasher likes to both throw parties and be the life of the party, so if he wins the election, Squid can only wonder how he’ll take to sitting through countless hours-long Fort Ord Reuse Authority or Monterey Peninsula Regional Water Authority meetings.

Unless you’re a freak like Squid, those meetings ain’t much of a party. #cephalopod4eva

COIN OPERATED… Squid’s never been very good at saving money. Every time Squid does the laundry and empties Squid’s pockets, Squid puts all the coins in a piggy bank, but it never adds up to much. Squid wonders if a couple of recent coin thefts are a faster way to cash in on pocket change: The Pacific Grove Police Department is searching for a suspect in recent parking meter vandalism near the American Tin Cannery. In a separate incident, the Marina Police Departmentreports someone forced open the coin vaults of four washing machines in an apartment building, then left “with an unknown amount of coins.”

And that’s not the end of it. Since February, Marina police have investigated about a dozen burglaries in which laundry machine coin boxes were forced open. Squid thought maybe a local criminal was taking a novel approach to thievery, but a quick Google search reveals that over the past couple months alone, coin thieves have hit laundromats in Massachusetts, Indiana, Ohio.

The damage to P.G.’s meters is estimated to require more than $2,700 in repairs. Squid doubts the thief, or thieves, got away with nearly that much – it’s more than 10,000 quarters. Maybe not as heavy, but certainly less efficient, than the heist of a 220-pound gold coin – worth more than $4 million – from a Berlin museum March 27.