Holding the audience in the palm of her hands--all eight of them

MIGHTY MOLLUSK: The newest resident of Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in San Pedro settled into her new quarters this week, a 500-gallon tank with plenty of room for her eight sucker-lined arms.

The 58-pound giant Pacific octopus was eased into the tank Tuesday afternoon, becoming the first octopus of its kind to go on display at the city-owned aquarium. And the orange mollusk with a 12-foot tentacle span played to the audience, crawling around the tank bottom as the television cameras whirred.

“She was just a great performer. Quite a crowd pleaser,” said exhibits director Mike Schaadt, who expects the octopus to attract plenty of visitors.

The giant Pacific octopus normally resides in cooler waters off Japan, the Aleutian Islands and the Pacific Northwest. But this one was discovered by a San Pedro fisherman inside a lobster trap off San Clemente Island and found its way to the San Pedro Fish Market, which donated it to the aquarium.

So far, the octopus remains unnamed.

“I’m sure someone else will (name it). Someone will come up with Octavia or Orelei,” said Schaadt. But Cabrillo Aquarium officials typically don’t assign names to their marine tenants.

“We’re attached as it is,” Schaadt explained. “We don’t need to be any more attached.”

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SO SUE ME: Before the stories even hit the newspapers, the trouble hit the fan for the top prosecutor in the district attorney’s Torrance office.

Last week head Deputy Dist. Atty. Monika Blodgett met with reporters from The Times and the Daily Breeze and said she was being demoted and transferred to a non-supervisory job in the Santa Monica office because she had complained about some of her Torrance predecessors “giving away the courthouse” with too-lenient plea bargains in criminal cases.

Her predecessor in the top slot in Torrance was none other than her boss, Dist. Atty. Gil Garcetti, whose 1992 campaign included promises he would halt overly generous plea bargains.

Blodgett, who retains a noticeable accent from her native Germany, also said she was being harassed because of her heritage, often being referred to by other D.A. office personnel as a “Nazi.”

By the time she got home that evening, Blodgett said later, there was a message on her answering machine ordering her to report Downtown the next day. Apparently the D.A.’s office had been alerted to her remarks when reporters called the office for comment. The next morning Blodgett was suspended for one day and, she said, forbidden to return to the Torrance office. The grounds for the disciplinary action, she said, included “insubordination” and failing to report contacts with the media.

“This is outrageous,” Blodgett, now a trial attorney in the Santa Monica branch of the district attorney’s office, said this week. “Even D.A.’s have 1st Amendment rights.”

The district attorney’s office has declined to comment, calling the disciplinary action a “personnel matter.”

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SIGN OF THE TIMES: In an apparent nod to a changing economy, Torrance will rename an obscure street just south of the city airport.

The 350-foot street, which has been known as “Douglas Way,” will now be called “Robinson Way” in honor of Robinson Helicopter Co., which has a new factory building slated to open in April. The street leads to the company’s main entrance.

The Torrance City Council approved the change Tuesday night after receiving a request from Robinson Helicopter.

City officials believe the old street name honored Douglas Aircraft, which later became a subsidiary of recession-battered McDonnell Douglas. The air-related theme is repeated with other area street names, such as Curtiss Way, Bellanca Way and Fairchild Apron. Torrance-based Robinson Helicopter, meanwhile, has grown from relative obscurity into one of the more successful aircraft companies in Southern California.

The change may go unnoticed by most city residents, since the street has only a single address: Torrance Fire Station No. 2.

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PLAY WORK: Parents of children at Walteria Elementary School in Torrance looked around last fall and saw that their children had a substandard playground. After 44 years of neglect, the swings had no seats, cushioning sand under the equipment had long washed away and the sandbox was mainly fare for termites.

Not exactly an educational crisis, but hey, kids deserve a nice place to play.

The district did not have money for playground improvements and the PTA was trying to fund more urgent educational needs, so the parents began raising money. More than 100 families helped, as did local businesses, and together they put on a Halloween Golf Tournament, carnival booths and a raffle. In December, parents and friends shoveled, excavated, planted and painted to provide a wheelchair-accessible playhouse, an elevated sandbox, a mural of jungle animals and a new blacktop. They also converted a corner of the playground into a vegetable garden to be planted by the kindergartners and their teachers.

The effort took 3,000 hours of work and $16,000 of donated materials.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Four times they stole the battery. I had a chain lock on it and they pulled that right off . . .. I’ve lived in Los Angeles all my life. We never even used to lock our doors.”

--Virginia Benedict, 75, of Gardena, who chained down the hood on her 1971 Chevy Nova to protect her car battery--and even that wasn’t protection enough.