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It's Not a Sewer, Goddamnit! It's a STORM DRAIN!

by Judith Lewis

August 14, 2007 11:41 AM

Last night my fella was catching up on this week's episode of "Entourage," in which that one kid, Turtle, gets pulled over and searched with three girls in the car. The cop who pats him down finds a prescription bottle full of ganja on him -- a precious and nearly extinct strain, as it happens. The cop tells Turtle to get down on his knees -- on a Los Angeles street, by the way -- which Turtle does. The cop hands Turtle the bottle of weed.

To be more explicit about this: Turtle is kneeling on the street right in front of the opening under the curb into which water and dirt flow off the street. The kind of slot that Heal the Bay stencils to remind you that everything you throw down there goes into the ocean. The drain our city planners invented so our streets wouldn't flood.

Then cop tells Turtle to throw the bottle of rare marijuana down the "sewer."

Turtle hesitates.

And, really, who wouldn't? I don't even smoke the stuff and I'd be loathe to deposit that little bottle of goods down that slot. Because, after all, it isn't a "sewer," is it?

No, it isn't. It's a storm drain. And you're not supposed to throw your garbage down the storm drain.

"That's really bad public education," I shouted at the TV. "Bad, bad, bad. This is why I hate television."

"Are you going to blog about it?" asked my guy.

"I guess I am," I said.

And so I am.

All that stenciling the sidewalks with the sweet little dolphins in blue paint. All those public awareness campaigns about beach closures and storm drains. The NRDC's announcement last week that the local beaches are dirtier than ever, drought be damned. That story I wrote last year about the lost streams of Los Angeles. Ken Weiss's Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the Oceans for the Los Angeles Times. All this -- and yet some bone-headed television writer lets a police officer refer to our storm drains that water and pollute the ocean as a SEWER?!

Don't those idiots surf?"

Luckily, Turtle really wanted his dope, rare, precious strain that it is. And perhaps he even cared about the ocean enough to not throw shit down the storm drain. So he got down on his knees again and fished it out.

Whew.

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