The Pacific from here to Santa Barbara has lately spit out oiled birds. Perplexed scientists offer the survivors a free bath and a return ticket offshore. At the same time, giant squid have slopped onto the sand DOA in Orange County, and public dissections in Dana Point reveal few clues. These may be separate mysteries or one combined. Those in the know have eliminated "natural seepage" from possible postulations. What a relief! All nature needs is another black mark on its sketchy rap sheet, even if lately the whole thing's a frame.

The squid, some think, have traveled from South America to replace a predator paucity in local waters. Sharks and the like have little space between nets and kayaks to do their thing, and poachers have helped push down populations cuz jaws look cool on the wall and shark fin soup is dee-licious. Why the squid have lately turned belly up is anyone's guess at this point.

The oil sludge has a source either undiscovered or unreported by a slippery conglomerate. Men have dug down into the primordial muck to suck up dinosaur guts and run them through internal combustion engines for so long -- and in so many places -- that we can't even figure out which pipe has burst. Well, we gotta drive, ya know. And often.

The tsunami human toll now tops 225,000, an enormous blow to millions of families. Still it's increasingly clear people could have avoided most of those deaths by not covering every island half a foot above sea level with hotels and trinket stands. Also heeding well-documented precedent and getting the heck back from suddenly water-absent beaches might have helped. Nobody rightly deserves to be washed out to sea, but, really, how embarrassing.

Meanwhile the California super storm a couple weeks ago takes the blame for broken sewage lines, and raging rivers of filthy city flotsam have turned the ocean into a bacterial porridge. Surfers ride in peril, children risk life wading, but it's not overpopulation's fault, or non-existent urban planning. It's all that rain.

Sad, huh.