OTTER OOPS… While Squid may have to chop off a tentacle or two to improve efficiency in these lean budget times, Squid figured CSUMB would still enroll this cephalopod in interdisciplinary major Experimental Techno Chemistry (EXTC). But an e-mail from university President Dianne Harrison got Squid worried that rave scholars would be turned away, courses slashed and programs abandoned due to the state’s fiscal nightmare. (Talk about a bad trip.) The letter to “supportuers” about the fate of “strudents” turned out to be, err, inoperative. “To my great personal regret, an electronic message was distributed under my name which I neither wrote nor approved,” Harrison writes. Whoops… Squid wonders which otter forgot to check in with the boss. Perhaps Scott Faust, former newspaperman turned university spokesman, got a little ahead of himself. Harrison concedes that CSUMB will not go above its enrollment targets, which could result in the young university rejecting surfers… Squid means students.

DRIVE, SHE SAID… Let’s see, there’s this little matter of a recession going on, but it doesn’t seem to stop porkbarrel politics in Sacramento. Outgoing Assemblyman John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, has been named to a $132,000 a year political patronage post with the state Integrated Waste Board. Laird is a decent sort, with impeccable environmental credentials, so Squid would have held Squid’s tentacles, but last Friday, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who vowed to eliminate the board way back in January 2006, appointed former state Sen. Carole Migden, D-San Francisco, to the board.

Migden, oceandwellers may recall, lost her safe seat to Mark Leno after a series of bizarre incidents– including having to plead no contest after an incident in which she slammed her SUV into another vehicle while driving home from Sacramento (she claimed it was because she was taking medication for leukemia at the time but it wasn’t the first automative adventure she’d been involved in) and racking up a record $350,000 in fines for campaign contribution violations. (Former state Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, was also recently named to the board, but as far as Squid knows, she hasn’t hit anyone. Besides, she played Zelda Gilroy on The Many Lives of Dobie Gillis.)

State Sen. Jeff Denham, R-Merced, for one, has had enough: He announced this week that he’s drafting legislation to eliminate the board and transfer its duties to another state agency. Squid is usually on the other side of the ocean from the elephantine GOP kingdom but in this case… you have to wonder just how lawmakers are defining “waste’’ these days.