TED TALKS… Squid felt a great deal of envy watching a few colleagues spruce up for a night on the town, Ted Balestreri-style. The invite had dropped just a few days before, asking a lucky few from the Weekly to the closing night dinner and auction of the Ted J. Balestreri Leadership Classic, a golf tourney benefiting the National Restaurant Association’s Educational Foundation. Also there and looking spiffy: the real power behind the throne, Panetta Institute for Public Policy Director Sylvia Panetta, and her husband, a guy named Leon.


Or, as most people know him, the U.S. Secretary of Defense.


Panetta (Leon, that is) took the stage to raucous applause to riff on his long friendship with Balestreri, that somewhat controversial bet where Balestreri promised to uncork a $10,000 bottle of 1870 Chateau Lafite-Rosthchild if Panetta caught Osama bin Laden, and how some members of Congress responded to bin Laden’s death by telling him he had done it the New Jersey way: “Put a bullet in his head, put him in a bag and dump him in the ocean,” Panetta said. 


Squid’s tentacles tingled at one auction item: an offer for CIA bootcamp. Could Squid raise enough money to be dropped off in the woods and play spy vs. spy? Then Squid read the fine print: CIA bootcamp was for a week of cooking school at the Culinary Institute of America, not a week of getting Squid’s Jason Bourne on.


SPEAKING OF STEALTH… Looks like Marina Gazette publisher and former Mayor Gary Wilmot has been typing without thinking. Wilmot, who in 2010 mused that current Mayor Bruce Delgado’s policies would have earned a bullet to the brain had he been in Vietnam, fired off an email last week to mayoral candidate Steve Emerson suggesting Emerson needs to “start taking out” Delgado’s minions, i.e. Marina Democratic Club President Luana Conley, Public Works Commission member Tim Ledesma and Marina Coast Water District board member Jan Shriner. “Every time they get up, you should attack them for using their powers to suppress public comment,” Wilmot fumed.


And he accidentally copied Delgado on the missive, prompting Delgado to tell him to knock it off. “Sorry about that, did not intend to send this to you,” Wilmot shot back.


Conley says she filed a complaint with Marina Police Chief Eddie Rodriguez, and Ledesma has spoken to the chief as well. “I do feel threatened by someone as intemperate, volatile and apparently unstable as he,” Conley says.


Maybe Wilmot just meant to say Emerson should start “taking them out”… for coffee?