CASTING CALL… Squid has decided to stop waiting by the phone. Local filmmaker Lawrence Roeck never called to offer this cephalopod a role in his seminal Carmel The Movie (now titled Carmel-by-the-Sea), about our crown jewel’s fading Bohemian culture. Yeah, Roeck has Alfred Molina, Lauren Bacall and Hayden Panettierre. He also has the cute Eastwood. (No, not you, Clint.) But he’s lacking one angry sea creature. So Squid threw up the old tentacles, oozed down to Best Buy and bought a Flip camera.

That’s right. Squid’s going into filmmaking. Working title: Carmel The (Political) Movie. Squid wants to cast the roles of all those who make Carmel political news worth reading. As Machiavellia, aka Mayor Sue McCloud, Dame Judy Dench (the latest M in the Bond movies) could fit the bill. One’s been trained to kill, the other to act like she’s been trained to kill. Now you tell Squid who is who.

For city manager wannabe Heidi Burch – who seems to live to make public inquiries die – Squid’s got Nicole Kidman: unflappable in the face of riotous attention, seemingly coated in Teflon. As Jane Miller, the woman-who-would-not-be seduced via e-mail, why not Meg Ryan? Wholesome, but with a taste for tough guys: Miller has her pistol-packing hubby, Sheriff Scott Miller, while Ryan at one time had a taste for Crowe. (Russell, that is.) As Jason Burnett, Hugh Grant circa 1999. Although in all fairness to Jason, who never met a scandal he couldn’t sidestep, Grant never met a scandal he couldn’t step in. Both have a sense for dramatic timing and irresistably cute features. Those twinkly blue eyes! Delish! And in the role of ousted, oops, “retired” city manager Rich Guillen: pseudo-comedian Gilbert Gottfried. Much like Guillen, Gottfried apparently can’t stay away from the Internet. The voice of Aflac’s iconic duck was canned this week by the insurance giant after tweeting jokes about the disaster in Japan. Who’ll play Adam Moniz, you ask director Squid? Adam Moniz, natch.

TAKE THE CRAB CAKE… Squid’s no sailor, but it takes special dedication to failure to crash into something as big as the Bay Bridge. Which is exactly what happened in 2007, when the container ship Cosco Busan tried to set sail to South Korea; 58,000 gallons of spilled oil later, area Dungeness crab fisheries temporarilly closed down.

Now, Gino Pennisi, owner of the Monterey wholesaler Royal Seafood, is suing the Hong Kong company that owned the ship for gross negligence. Customers stopped buying, Pennisi found himself short on cash to pay back fishermen. They sued, and Pennisi wants his legal fees and lost crab sales paid back – totaling no less than a half million clams.