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Vol. 10, No. 12 – March 15 – March 28, 2017 – Ojai News & Events

The Ojai Concert Series continues its commitment to bringing outstanding musicians to Ojai with an evening of exciting French Canadian “Québécois” folk music on Saturday, March 18th (7pm), by the “rarely on the west coast, but famous on the east”, Yves Lambert Trio playing some delightful Quebec folk music.

In 1976 Yves Lambert formed the now legendary La Bottine Souriante, a Quebec folk band specializing in traditional Québécois music with a modern twist. Ojai Valley Woman’s Club, 441 Ojai Ave. $20 in advance, $25 at the door. For more info or directions to the Ojai Valley Woman’s Club, go to www.ojaiconcertseries.com or call 665-8852.

“Hollywood Nights:  Letting Our Stars Shine”, is the theme for this year’s annual auction at Villanova Preparatory School. Villanova provides a challenging, and rigorous college preparatory curriculum, taught by a world class faculty, in a family environment that promotes the development of the mind and heart of young adults from diverse backgrounds.

Villanova continues to rely on the generosity of businesses, families, alumni, and friends to assist in providing a quality education and programs for the students. This year, the auction fundraising goal is to raise funds to build a new Art Center. Donors and sponsors will have their names and/or businesses proudly showcased in the printed program and on the school website. The event will be held at the parish hall at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Ojai, on March 25 with silent auction viewing and appetizers from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.  Dinner, entertainment and D.J. (Cover2Cover) after 7:00 p.m.

All inquiries welcome! Please call Tessa Hottinger at 646-1464 ext. 126.

The Ojai Photography Club shifts into high gear with a presentation by Juan Carlo Mendoza, Ventura County Star staff photographer, “Photojournalism: Integrating Life and Lens.” His presentation will include numerous recent images. He will speak about his career as a photojournalist, the stories behind his images and his passion for the outdoors, which includes living in a tree house! Tuesday, March 21, at 7:00 p.m. in Help of Ojai’s Kent Hall, 111 West Santa Ana St.

The Ojai Photography Club, which is devoted to education, inspiration, and camaraderie, meets on the third Tuesday of each month, February – November. Only members may submit images for review. For additional information please visit: www.ojaiphotoclub.com/.

The Ojai Playwrights Conference announced performers and honorees for its 20th Anniversary Benefit Gala – “Celebrating 20 Years of Visionary Voices” scheduled for Saturday, April 8 the Benefit begins at 4:00pm at Matilija Auditorium with an extraordinary event created especially for this evening. Following the show, the festivities continue at Topa Mountain Winery, with a evening of fine wines, festive cocktails, a “Farm to Table Feast” prepared by some of Southern California’s finest chefs, and a live auction!

Writer and performer Cynthia Waring will visit the Ojai Library at 1 p.m. on Saturday, March 18 to present a workshop titled “The Power and Healing of Writing Your Memoir.” Waring, author of the published memoir Bodies Unbound and author and performer of two one-woman shows, will be sharing her process of memoir writing. She will also discuss how writing can integrate memories and heal old wounds.

Participants will get a chance to write a story of their own using the guidance of the instructor during this one and a half hour workshop. For more information www.BodiesUnbound.com. Please bring a journal to write and pen!

This event is free and open to the public. For additional information, contact Ron Solórzano, Regional Librarian at 218-9146. The Ojai Library is located at 111 East Ojai Ave.

Spring Hebrew School session is starting  March 20 at the Jewish Community of Ojai. The school teaches beginning Hebrew reading and writing, Jewish holidays, and ethics and values to children 3rd grade and up. The 10 week sessions help prepare students for their B’nai Mitzvah training. Come join for an Open House on March 13 at 6:30 PM at out Temple located at 530 West El Roblar Ave., Ojai to meet teacher, and see the school. For further info, visit www.ojaitemple.org, call 646-4464, or contact Pearl at 646-1721.

Diane Elizabeth Huntington Loring has left Ventura (and America)

“Just not sure if I can afford to buy this house?”

by Diane Loring

Related to one of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence, Samuel Huntington and in protest of the recent election of a president not being qualified or fit to be representative of what the Declaration stood for, Diane Elizabeth Huntington Loring has left America.   Samuel Huntington was Diane’s uncle four generations removed and son of Nathaniel Huntington her great grandfather five generations removed.

When revisiting the Declaration of Independence it strikes me how most charges made against King George III (whom I share a common ancestor with both of us descendants of our great grandfather line of Edmund Tudor), seem to be in direct correlation to many of the charges currently being made by, including myself against Donald Trump.

It is fascinating on many levels to read the Declaration of Independence and realize what has not changed in America after two hundred and forty years, specifically no mention of women and what is afforded them as equal citizens.  It seems instead America has come full circle by electing the very representation of what they loathed and were originally leaving, King George III ruler of Great Britain, Ireland and the Thirteen Colonies.

While women were not mentioned in the original Declaration of Independence, they have had the opportunity for over ten years holding absolute power and percentage of the vote to right the Declaration of Independence and their unstated inequality once and for all.  They have unequivocally rebuked that opportunity twice in ten years, electing a President who again, if you read carefully in the Declaration, sounds much like the reasons two hundred and forty years ago the Signers of the Declaration of Independence vilified King George III.

I have spent most of my life fighting the good fight for women and equal rights for all.  My forefathers have been fighting from the beginning as well as my foremothers.  My father, uncle and grandfather fought in World War II.  My step-grandfather was shot down over Germany, captured by Hitler, spent years in a prisoner of war camp and was ultimately awarded a Purple Heart.  These were good, honorable, ethical men who also had a high regard for the women in my family and I believe would be mortified by America’s choice of president.   All the while they were gone, women held down the home front, working outside the home, while raising children.

At this point I believe America is in a very sad state and downward spiral of cyclic dysfunction and either women need to exercise the power they hold for epic change or quit the fight altogether and be content with their status.  I have chosen to return to my ancestral home of London, England and truly feel that I am home safe where lives her Royal Majesty, my relative and Queen.

Best of luck to America. God Save the Queen.

 

Ventura Fire crews respond to single family home fire

On March 3,  just after 10:30am a fire ravaged a single family home in the 800 block Jazmin Ave in East Ventura. The first on scene Engine Company found the kitchen, several rooms, and the attic in flames. Crews aggressively fought the fire and searched the building for occupants– based on several reports by bystanders that people were still inside. The fire was knocked down within 18 minutes. After a very thorough search, it was determined that no one was in the home at the time of the fire.

The neighbor was the first person to report the emergency. She stated the fire quadrupled in size in the few minutes it took for crews to arrive on scene from the original 911 call.

The four bedroom, two bath home also had extensive smoke damage. Fire investigators determined the fire started in the kitchen area and the exact cause is under investigation. A total of 6 residents were displaced from the fire. Red Cross responded to the scene and provided immediate aid to the family. Ventura Building and Safety red tagged the main residence. Preliminary estimates put the loss at $250,000 to the structure and $50,000 in contents.

Vol. 10, No. 12 – March 15 – March 28, 2017 – Tech Today

Tech Today with Ken May

How did Amazon take down the internet?

On Tuesday, February 28th, an Amazon cloud server, specifically an AWS cluster of servers in the US-EAST-1 region, stopped responding. Sites and web apps like Mashable, Trello, Giphy, Quora, Netflix, Spotify, Slack, Pinterest and Buzzfeed, as well as tens of thousands of smaller sites all were suddenly down or slowed to a crawl. To the average person, all we saw was that a ton of sites and apps in common usage were not working. How does this happen?

It was so bad that Amazon wasn’t able to update its own service health dashboard for the first two hours of the outage because the dashboard itself was hosted on AWS.

“This is a pretty big outage,” said Dave Bartoletti, a cloud analyst with Forrester. “AWS had not had a lot of outages and when they happen, they’re famous. People still talk about the one in September of 2015 that lasted five hours,” he said.

The reason this affected so many sites is because Amazon’s AWS platform hosts virtual servers used by all of these businesses. Amazon’s S3 cloud storage systems were also affected. SO, even a site not running on an AWS server might have issues if it’s data was on S3. For example, a business might store its videos, images or databases on an S3 server and access it via the Internet.

As it turns out, it was all due to human error. A simple typo. As Amazon explains it, some of its S3 servers were operating rather sluggish, so a tech tried fixing it by taking a few billing servers offline. A fix straight from the company’s playbook, it says. “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended.” Whoops.

As for why the problem took so long to correct, Amazon says that some of its server systems haven’t been restarted in “many years.” Given how much the S3 system has expanded, “the process of restarting these services and running the necessary safety checks to validate the integrity of the metadata took longer than expected.”

Cyence, an economic modeling platform, shared some data that show the ramifications:

-Losses of $150 million for S&P 500 companies

-Losses of $160 million for U.S. financial services companies using the infrastructure

Apica Inc., a website-monitoring company, said 54 of the internet’s top 100 retailers saw website performance slow by 20% or more.

Ouch!

Amazon apologized for the issue and said that it has put schemes in place to avoid the same problems caused by human error in the future. Let’s have this stand as a reminder to have adequate failover systems in place! Never put all your eggs in one basket.

Find out the winners of the Take 1 Online Short Film Festival

The winners of the 5th Annual Water: Take 1 Online Short Film Festival will be announced at a free event on Wednesday, March 22 at the Channel Islands National Park Visitor Center located at 1901 Spinnaker Drive in Ventura Harbor.

Water: Take 1 aims to create a greater awareness of water as a valuable resource by inviting filmmakers locally and worldwide to submit short films in any genre that address the topic of water. Last year’s film “The Conservation Enforcer” took the Grand Prize, earning the filmmaker a cash prize of $1,500. Additional prizes will be awarded for the Audience Choice Award, Best Student Short Film, and Ventura Vision Award.

The ceremony will kick off with appetizers and refreshments followed by a screening of the finalist films and the announcement of the winners. Visit www.watertake1.com to see the films entered.

Space is limited. Make sure to RSVP at 652-4587.

New CVS Pharmacy in Ventura

On March 11 the new CVS Pharmacy located at 2260 Thompson had their official ribbon cutting and the Ventura Breeze was there. Among the gathered CVS employees and company officials were Breanna Olsen, Pharmacy Manager: Matt Gibbons, District Manager: Laura Schneider, Store Manager and Emad Tadros, Pharmacy Supervisor.

Vol. 10, No. 12 – March 15 – March 28, 2017 – Movie Review

Get Out
4 Palm Trees out of 4
by Manuel Reynoso

Written and Directed by Jordan Peele, starring Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Bradley Whitford, Caleb Landry Jones, Stephen Root, LaKeith Stanfield and Catherine Keener.

Black photographer Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) travels to the suburbs to meet his white girlfriend’s affluent parents. What starts as an awkward family get together quickly becomes far more insidious.

Jordan Peele’s directorial debut was stronger than I would have anticipated. To be blunt, I was never huge fan of the sketch show Key & Peele. So coming into Get Out slightly skeptical, I was pleasantly surprised how strong of a debut Peele has made with Get Out. It’s funny, scary, provocative, and at times, far too real. As difficult it is to swallow, Get Out brings to light the struggles of being a black man, in a white world.

For his first major motion picture directorial debut, Jordan Peele clearly already has a distinct style that lends itself very well to the thriller genre. He’s set up how ominous an otherwise docile suburban white family was in very clever ways. While letting striking imagery lead up to a very intense climax. Jordan Peele has definitely shown he has the chops to direct a major motion picture.

Peele’s Screenplay is where is strongest talents lie. Incorporating the black experience into an engaging mystery thriller with equal parts horror and comedy is absolute gold. The film twists and turns, terrifying us one moment, and making us laugh at loud the next. But Get Out’s biggest strength is in its pacing. The constant feeling of escalation and tension is so organically paced you will not notice yourself inching ever closer to the edge of your seat the whole time. Despite the constant escalation of dread, the comedy aspect never breaks this tension. Instead it is welcomed respite, saving you from becoming fatigued from the continuous tension.

The political nature of the screenplay was provocative and edgy, sadly I do believe it lets up on the political side of the film towards the end. Peele opted to have the climax be more intense and action packed, which while has its own strengths in the film, just left the political nature of the film feel a tad glossed over.

Outside the wonderful script, I would sum up the rest of the film as solid. Nothing else stood out as exceptionally praiseworthy. Daniel Kaluuya performance as the lead was definitely good but nothing I found all that exceptional. Cinematography was utilitarian, while the camera work presented the scenes nicely, I felt it could have better complimented the film’s striking and engaging imagery. I’m not putting down the film with these observations, just noting the film was not particularly exciting in these other aspects

Peele has made his intentions to create more films based on social demons loud and heard. And I for one am looking forward to these films very much. Get Out was very clear in it’s purpose to add a black perspective to the thriller genre. So if Get Out accomplished anything at all, it showed the power of storytelling from a perspective frequently ignored in mainstream media. And I for one want to see more.

1H44M rated R

147 new homes coming to Ventura’s Westside

Amenities will include three new neighborhood parks.

On March 22, at 11:30 a.m. a groundbreaking ceremony for Solana Heights – 147 new homes in Ventura’s Westside neighborhood will be held.

Solana Heights, the master-planned community developed by CalAtlantic Homes, will bring 147 new homes to Ventura’s housing market including 116 single-family homes with two story floor plans and 3-5 bedrooms, as well as 31 townhomes with two and three story floor plans and 3 to 4 bedrooms. Several of the homes will have coastal views.

Solana Heights’ family-friendly amenities will also feature three new neighborhood parks totaling 1.5 acres of outdoor gathering spaces with play equipment, picnic tables and barbeques, and a gated dog park. It’s a very pleasant place to live so if your family want to move here then it is well worth the investment. A moving company like Big T will make it easier for you to move all your belongings and get your move off to a positive start.

The groundbreaking will be held at 2686 N. Ventura Avenue at School Canyon Road. Follow the signs for parking. Please wear comfortable walking shoes; this location is an active construction site.

Speakers will include City of Ventura Mayor Erik Nasarenko, CalAtlantic Vice President of Project Development Ken Melvin and Division President Elliot Mann.

City of Ventura classes and tours

Check out hundreds more on web-site.

Call 658-4726 to register, if you already have an ACTIVENET account online, visit www.cityofventura.net . Classes held at the Barranca Vista Center, 7050 E Ralston St unless noted.

Canine Body Language Seminar  18 years-adult
3/18     Sa        10 am-12 pm              $20      #7699
Identify signs of anxiety versus playfulness and open new lines of communication with your pet. Led by Registered Veterinary Technician/Certified Professional Dog Trainer Shannon Coyner. Please leave your dog at home for this seminar. Classes held at 3521Arundel Circle #B.

Erle Stanley Gardner’s Ventura  teen-adult
3/18     Sa        1-3 pm             $20      #8089
Meet at City Hall’s front steps for admission to the former courtroom where the crusading lawyer and author of 84 Perry Mason books held audiences spellbound during such cases as “Fairchild vs Burnet.”

Learn Digital Photography  16 years-adult
3/18     Sa        3-6 pm             $65      #8195
Brent covers camera use, lenses, equipment, tripods and understanding exposure and composition from basic concepts through advanced techniques for beginner/intermediate digital photographers.

3D Printing Level 1  8-16 years
3/22-5/17         W         4-5:30 pm        $149+$25 supply fee  #7961
New age artists and designers will scan, model, morph and 3D print their projects using fun and easy Google Sketch-up and Autodesk Tinkercad. No class 4/5.

Weird California!  12 years-adult
3/23-4/6           Th        6:30-7:30 pm   $40      #7959
Probe our local unsolved mysteries and murders and learn about our pygmy mammoths, intricate Chumash canoes, wooden Mission bells, an 1847 skirmish and 1945 Japanese bombing.

Lunchtime Fitness with Jackie  18 years-adult
3/24-4/26         M/W/F             11:30 am-12:30 pm    $60      #7676
We mix low-impact aerobics, muscle toning and stretching with a few dance moves, some Pilates and yoga. Instructor Jackie Ringhof.

Mysterious Main Street Tour  teen-adult
3/25     Sa        8-10 pm           $20      #8090
Meet at City Hall’s front steps for a “night walk” through Ventura’s historic district with stories (some ghostly) about its lost treasures, gunfighters, battles and visits by a famed battleship and a president soon to be assassinated.