Photo by Michael Gordon
A Chamber of Commerce ribbon cutting was held at the new Papa John’s Pizza in the Von’s shopping strip mall located at 5722 Telephone Rd. (805) 290-4922.
Photo by Michael Gordon
A Chamber of Commerce ribbon cutting was held at the new Papa John’s Pizza in the Von’s shopping strip mall located at 5722 Telephone Rd. (805) 290-4922.
The Rotary Club of Ventura has selected Margi Wray as club president for the 2022/2023 year. She follows Rob van Nieuwburg, under whose leadership the club sponsored many charitable and community events, including resumption of the popular Independence Day Family Picnic and Fireworks show, Coats for Kids, a free weekly optometry clinic, supporting a monarch butterfly habitat at Camp Arnaz, supporting the Navajo Water Project, youth activities, and more.
“We have a strong organization thanks to the work of long-standing club members, coupled with new energy and focus of our newer members,” said Margi. Her goals are to serve our community’s needs through corroboration within our club and other service organizations in the community, increase transparency through good communication, and key into members’ talents, expertise and passions to serve our community.
Margi has worked as a sculptor, goldsmith, and wax carver. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the University of Illinois. She is not new to leadership. She served 21 years on the Murrieta Valley Unified School District Board of Education, including four years as Board President. She says, “That experience will serve me well in goal setting, evaluation of performance and in community interaction.”
Having moved to the Ventura area only 3 years ago, she attributes her time in Rotary to rapidly making her feel at home in a new environment. “I have been instantly connected to so many people who have ‘Service above Self’ at the core of who they are,” she explains, “and it has made my transition to involvement and work in this community seamless. If you have ever wanted to be more involved in the community, we look forward to meeting you!”
The Rotary Club of Ventura celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2019. Its members include business leaders, nonprofit leaders and civic professionals who meet regularly and perform charity and community service in Ventura and throughout the world. It is part of Rotary International, which has more than 1.4 million members in 46,000 clubs in 168 countries. People join the club for fellowship, friendship and to give back to our local community and the beyond. The Rotary Club is actively seeking new members. To learn more, visit https://portal.clubrunner.ca/2868/.
Ventura City Councilmember, Jeannette Sanchez-Palacios is formally announcing her candidacy for the Ventura City Council, District 4 seat. Jeannette Sanchez-Palacios resides in the city of Ventura with her husband of more than 25 years and their 2 children. She holds degrees in Public Administration, Women’s Studies, and Political Science from the California State University – Northridge (CSUN), University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA), and Santa Monica Community College (SMC).
Vista del Mar Hospital welcomes Tiffany Bumpus and Marianne Barrinuevo to its leadership team. Bumpus has been appointed the Director of Human Resources, and Barrinuevo is the new Chief Nursing Officer.
“We are thrilled to welcome Tiffany and Marianne to the team. Tiffany has a comprehensive background in recruitment and staffing, benefits administration, employee and labor relations, and employment law compliance. Marianne has the unique experience of working for Vista del Mar early in her career and excelling as a clinician. They each bring a strong professional background and will be key players as we rebuild the hospital,” said Dan Powell, Chief Executive Officer of Vista del Mar Hospital. “They are both a natural fit for our Vista family, and I am pleased to have them on board.”
Tiffany Bumpus is a human resource professional with 20 years of progressive global experience working in the technology, healthcare, government, and private sectors. Before joining Vista del Mar Hospital, Bumpus served as the Benefits Administrator II at Vsolvit LLC. She has held many leadership positions, including Sales and Recruitment Manager for Ledgent Finance and Accounting in Woodland Hills; Staffing Account Manager for Corestaff Services in Ventura; Director of Human Resources for Clinicas Del Camino Real in Camarillo; and Human Resources Manager for Systems Applications & Technologies, Inc. in Oxnard. She holds a Master’s of Business Administration from the University of Phoenix and a Bachelor’s in Psychology from San Diego State University.
Marianne Barrinuevo brings Vista del Mar Hospital 25 years of clinical experience. She started her career at Camarillo State Hospital as a Licensed Psychiatric Technician. She then advanced to Vista del Mar Hospital in 1997, where she eventually became an RN Supervisor, Charge Nurse, and Medical Nurse within 11 years. Barrinuevo has held many leadership positions, including Chief Nursing Officer for College Hospital Cerritos; Director of Psychiatric Services for Southern California Hospital in Culver City; Vice President of Clinical Services for Horizon Health; Director of Nursing and Infection Preventionist for Santa Barbara County Behavioral Health; and Director of Clinical Services at Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara Medical Center/Behavior Health Center. She holds a Master’s of Science and Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing from West Haven University.
by Richard Newsham, VMF consultant
The Ventura Music Festival’s “Onward!” 27th season opens tonight with a Free Concert in the Park featuring the gospel, West African and American funk world-fusion mix of the all-female band Adaawe at downtown Ventura’s Mission Park on Wednesday, July 27, at 5:30 pm.
The festival venue then moves to the intimate 400-seat Ventura College Performing Arts Center, 4700 Loma Vista Road, for two weekends of concerts beginning with sensational Irish band We Banjo 3 and its Celtgrass vocal and string blend of “bluegrass and beyond” on Friday, July 29, at 7:30 pm. Direct from Paris the Django Festival Allstars quintet brings us “le jazz hot” style of legendary guitarist Django Reinhardt on Saturday, July 30, at 7:30 pm. And weekend one concludes with local piano virtuoso gone globally famous Sean Chen alluring us with romantic pearls by Mozart, Debussy, Liszt, Chopin, Rachmaninoff and Mendelssohn on Sunday, July 31, at 3 pm.
Weekend two opens on Friday, August 5, at 7:30 pm, with a unique sextet of a soprano, alto, baritone, bass and two tenor saxophones called The Moanin’ Frogs—the moniker is an unlikely contraction of two 1910’s saxophone hit tunes, The Bullfrog Blues and That Moanin’ Saxophone Rag. But the ensemble name aptly fits a repertoire that “electrifies and delights” audiences nationwide—defying genres with every jump from primo orchestral, concerto and chamber arrangements to treasured jazz, burlesque and vaudeville improvisations.
On Saturday, August 6, at 7:30 pm, Veronica Swift—a young chanteuse with deep jazz roots but now branching out with classical, rock, soul, folk and funk selections—is determined as an artist to bring a post-COVID rebirth of hope to audiences everywhere as she breaks down genre barriers, uniting them under an anthem called “Sing”—an uplifting tribute to the positive change that music brings to the world. “There is this thing that’s like touching, except you don’t touch, you sing, just sing,” claims the artist. “The act of singing is a kind of secular prayer, in the spirit of John Lennon’s Imagine.”
The VMF festival concludes on Sunday, August 7, at 3 pm, with what the New York Times calls “America’s most astonishing choir,” The Crossing led by conductor Donald Nally and embracing new music with “a social conscience and fearless technique” created by the world’s most prestigious living composers and performed at marquee venues with the nation’s most adventuresome orchestras and ensembles. Find out why radio host Brian Lauritzen champions this 24-voice winner of two Grammy® awards for Best Choral Performance and 7 more nominations on his weekly “A Joyful Noise” KUSC broadcast of choral music almost every Sunday morning.
Year after year, the Ventura Music Festival is renowned for showcasing a breathtaking multiverse of musical styles from classical to contemporary. Connect with the artists and with fellow listeners in our community who love to discover the joy and excitement of familiar and brave new worlds of sound by attending VMF concerts this weekend and next.
Tickets: $15-65 at www.venturamusicfestival.org and 805.648.3146.
SPAN Thrift Store is open to the public and looking for donations of adult clothing, household items and tools. SPAN regularly provides $10 spay and neuter clinics for low income households for cats and dogs. Upcoming clinics include: Tuesday, Aug 9th, Albert Soliz Library parking lot, 2820 Jourdan St., Oxnard; Tuesday, Aug 30th , SPAN Thrift Store parking lot, 110 N. Olive St, Ventura. Please call to schedule an appointment (805) 584-3823.
∙ Dogs are capable of learning the instruction “do that again,” and can flexibly access memories of their own recent actions—cognitive abilities they were not known to possess, researchers report.
Teaching a dog to sit or roll over? That’s easy. But what about that cute head tilt that you’ve never seen before, which happened while your phone was out of reach? Now you want a picture.
But how do you get a dog to repeat an action it hasn’t been trained to perform? For dogs taught to “think back” on cue, you just need to ask, the new study shows.
“We found that dogs could be trained to repeat specific actions on cue, and then take what they’d learned and apply it to actions they had never been asked to repeat,” says Allison Scagel, a graduate student in the University at Buffalo psychology department at the time of the research, and corresponding author of the study in the Journal of Comparative Psychology.
“Our findings showed that they were able to apply the concept of repetition to new situations. More generally, we found evidence that dogs are capable of forming abstract concepts.”
Historically, there has been a notion that conscious awareness of past personal experiences is the exclusive domain of humans, but recent research isn’t supporting that conclusion, Scagel says.
“Our study shows that dogs are capable of conceptualization, placing them in an expanding category of other animals that includes bottlenose dolphins and chimpanzees.”
The findings present new flexible training possibilities for dogs, Scagel says.
“Dogs can do more than learn the relationship between a person’s cue and which specific trick they should perform,” she says. “They can understand the concept of repetition: Whatever you just did, do that again. It can apply to anything they do.”
Animals are often tested on their ability to recall things in the external environment they have recently observed, such as objects, sounds, or scents. Memories of actions are different because they’re not outwardly perceivable. Memories are entirely internal; they are purely mental representations of previous personal experiences that can be recalled in ways that might influence what an animal chooses to do in the future.
For this study, the researchers looked at dogs’ memories of their own recently performed actions to determine if they could voluntarily think back to what they had just been doing and reproduce those actions.
Traditional dog training is cue and response. When dogs hear or see a trained cue, they respond with a behavior associated with that cue. For a baseline, the researchers started training the dogs in that fashion, with simple cues like spin in a circle, lie down, or walk around an object.
The dogs then learned a separate repeat cue (the word “again” accompanied by a hand gesture), which instructed them to reproduce the action they had just completed. To assess whether the dogs had actually learned a general concept of repeating recent actions, they were asked to repeat novel actions that they had never been asked to repeat before. Despite never being trained to repeat these actions, the dogs passed this test.
“This is an important step toward a greater understanding of how other species form abstract concepts,” says Scagel. “And we’re learning that humans aren’t that cognitively unique after all.”
Source: University at Buffalo
∙ Cornell researchers have provided the first documentation that dogs’ sense of smell is integrated with their vision and other unique parts of the brain, shedding new light on how dogs experience and navigate the world.
“We’ve never seen this connection between the nose and the occipital lobe, functionally the visual cortex in dogs, in any species,” said Pip Johnson, assistant professor in the Department of Clinical Sciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine and senior author of “Extensive Connections of the Canine Olfactory Pathway Revealed by Tractography and Dissection,” published July 11 in the Journal of Neuroscience.
“It makes a ton of sense in dogs,” she said. “When we walk into a room, we primarily use our vision to work out where the door is, who’s in the room, where the table is. Whereas in dogs, this study shows that olfaction is really integrated with vision in terms of how they learn about their environment and orient themselves in it.”
Erica Andrews, a former analyst in Johnson’s lab, is the paper’s first author and currently works in canine aging research.
Johnson and her team performed MRI scans on 23 healthy dogs and used diffusion tensor imaging, an advanced neuroimaging technique, to locate the dog brain’s white matter pathways, the information highways of the brain. They found connections between the olfactory bulb and the limbic system and piriform lobe, where the brain processes memory and emotion, which are similar to those in humans, as well as never-documented connections to the spinal cord and the occipital lobe that are not found in humans.
“It was really consistent,” Johnson said. “And size-wise, these tracts were really dramatic compared to what is described in the human olfactory system, more like what you’d see in our visual systems.”
Tractography, a 3D-modeling process, allowed Johnson and her team to map and virtually dissect the white matter tracts. The findings in the digital images were later confirmed by a co-author and white matter expert at Johns Hopkins University.
Johnson said the research corroborates her clinical experiences with blind dogs, who function remarkably well. “They can still play fetch and navigate their surroundings much better than humans with the same condition,” Johnson said. “Knowing there’s that information freeway going between those two areas could be hugely comforting to owners of dogs with incurable eye diseases.”
Identifying new connections in the brain also opens up new lines of questioning. “To see this variation in the brain allows us to see what’s possible in the mammalian brain and to wonder – maybe we have a vestigial connection between those two areas from when we were more ape-like and scent-oriented, or maybe other species have significant variations that we haven’t explored,” Johnson said.
Johnson plans to examine the olfactory system’s structure in the brains of cats and horses, which aligns with the broader goals of her research program – to leverage the most advanced imaging techniques, used commonly in human clinical research, to better understand animal brain physiology and disease.
Johnson is also part of the Cornell Margaret and Richard Riney Canine Health Center.
∙ An Alaska family had given up hope of finding their blind, elderly golden retriever who wandered away from their home three weeks ago, but a construction crew found Lulu in salmonberry bushes after initially confusing her for a bear.
Lulu was barely alive after being found but she is being nursed back to health and is back home with her family, the Daily Sitka Sentinel reported.
“She means everything,” owner Ted Kubacki said. “I have five daughters and they’re 4 to 13 years old, so they’ve spent every day of their life with that dog.”
The Kubacki family searched for weeks after Lulu wandered off June 18.
“She’s just so helpless, and you kind of imagined that she can’t get real far because she can’t see,” he said.
Hi: I’m Annie, a sweet and beautiful 7-year-old Terrier mix who would love to find my home with a lot of love. I’m house broken and I have good manners. In the beginning I didn’t want to be left alone. I need to know this is a secure home before I can relax and feel comfortable. I love to lay next to you on your couch while we watch tv. 15-30 min walks twice a day is perfect for me. I sleep in my foster mom’s bed with another little dog.
The reason my foster mom can’t keep me is because she travels between the US and Europe too often. My foster mom loves me dearly and wants me to have the best home. If you want to love me I will love you back unconditionally. My foster mom says I am the sweetest in the world.
Please fill out an online application to meet me https://carldogs.org/. CARL Adoption Center-call 644-7387 for more information.
Meet Nala, an affectionate 6-year-old American Staffordshire Terrier Mix. Her previous family was no longer able to care for her. She’s loving, gentle and, of course, adorable! If there are kids in the house, they should be on the older side. If you’d like to meet Nala, schedule an appointment at vcas.us/adopt or come down to the Camarillo Shelter during normal Adoption Hours of 1:00pm – 6:00pm Tuesday – Sunday. If you have questions (805) 388-4341 or [email protected]. Animal ID: A707108 Kennel: 012 ,Shelter: Camarillo Animal Shelter
Adoption Process: www.vcas.us/adopt
Convene and Connect with Community Retreat
Ojai California, September 3, 2022. The Deborah King Center is excited to host its first post-pandemic, live, in-person, retreat, right here in Ojai!
As a special thank you to the community that we call home, we are offering a Saturday only day pass (starts at 8am and goes until 9pm) to locals for just $25! Learn, connect, and enjoy live music from the Deborah King Band.
Join for Saturday Sept 3rd HERE: https://deborahking.com/saturday2022/
Gather transformative knowledge, connect with community, and uncover your most powerful, transcendent self.
We’d love to meet you in person. And we hope to see you there for what promises to be a truly remarkable day.
If you’re interested in attending the entire retreat, September 1st to the 4th, you can still get the full 4-day pass at https://deborahking.com/events/convene-and-connect-with-community-retreat/
Sat, July 23, 1:30pm. Ojai Art Center,113 S. Montgomery StreetTreat yourself to a day in beautiful Ojai. Enjoy browsing the shop, soak up the tranquil vibes, and grab a bite at one of the many dining establishments featuring locally sourced food, wine and beer. For your entertainment pleasure plan to spend 2-4 pm at the Ojai Art Center with the magnificent Amanda McBroom. “…the greatest cabaret performer of her generation, an urban poet who writes like an angel and has a voice to match” – The NY Times
Tickets: online $25 general admission or $35 VIP (first two rows), at the door $30 or $40 VIP. Call: 805-746-0936. https://ojaiconcerts.com
by Shirley Lorraine
Elite Tackles Complex Issues
Humanity is inherently flawed. In judgement, in morals, and in using honesty as a compass for life. This is the basis for the drama/dark comedy Lobby Hero by Kenneth Lonergan now on stage at the Elite Playhouse in Channel Islands through August 7.
The extremely strong cast of four takes hold of their given dilemmas and attacks them with vigor and confidence. Solidly directed by Cate Caplin, the cast features Rosie Gordon, Herb Hall, Gabriel Tejeda-Benitez and Bill Walthall. All are compelling in their commitment to their characters and each one pulls the audience into their world without apology.
The action takes place in the lobby of an up-scale apartment building in Manhattan. It is the graveyard shift and Jeff (Tejeda-Benitez), a young man struggling with housing and money issues, is on duty. He is a security guard and a rather lax one at that. His supervisor, William (Hall), is a no-nonsense man with a high sense of propriety in life. The “Captain” has been a security guard for a number of years and expects his underlings to be equally diligent in their duties.
An affable neighborhood police officer, Bill (Walthall) is a frequent evening visitor to the building, supposedly to visit a friend. On this night, his rookie partner Dawn (Gordon) accompanies him and waits in the lobby with Jeff. New to the job, Dawn is at once reluctant to engage in conversation with Jeff, and yet is drawn in to learn that all may not be what it seems.
Bill has secrets. William discovers that his brother may have been party to a crime. Both find themselves in a moral quagmire and must decide where their loyalties lie as well as accept the consequences that must be faced. Dawn is disappointed in Bill, her mentor, as he reveals that he is a flawed, entitled officer nearing retirement who is within sight of the coveted “golden badge” for his service which will be lost if his indiscretions become known. Jeff’s thinking is adrift as he says both too little and too much at the wrong times.
The play is complex and substantive. The actors are all superb. Direction is tight. The audience is faced with all-too real situations that could easily skew an individual’s moral compass when push comes to shove.
The frank dialogue is peppered with expletives, and is often uncomfortable as the characters each grapple with the depth of their dilemmas. Although their situations differ, they are linked with one another through common knowledge, making decisions even more difficult to process.
The portrayals are so natural that it was easy to commiserate with each of the characters as they attempted to justify their actions. But rationale does not necessarily equal right. Each is acutely aware that how they cope with the circumstances will affect their futures and their friendships.
A well-written, well executed piece of theater.
Lobby Hero plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sunday matinees. (805 483-5118, www.theElite.org. Proof of vaccination required, masks recommended.