A Montecito evacuee vs. the ongoing storm, CSU passes two proposals to address campus enrollment strains, a Chicano civil rights activist gets the spotlight.
With a fifth evacuation, Montecito residents are feeling the emotional toll
Winter storms are bringing heavy rains to Southern California. Thursday morning, the National Weather Service was on a flash flood watch throughout Santa Barbara County.
Thousands of people in Santa Barbara were ordered to evacuate because officials were concerned about the potential for mudslides and debris flows in areas scarred by wildfires last winter.
Tom Cole was one of those evacuees. He left his home Tuesday and said he hopes to return by Friday. Cole is from Montecito, the coastal town hit by massive mudslides in January that killed 21 people.
This is the fifth evacuation Cole and his neighbors have experienced since December, he said. One was because of fires and the other four were because of potential floods. The residents of Montecito are staying strong, Cole said, but the repeated evacuations are taking an emotional toll.
There's huge evacuation fatigue. It's a big drain on everybody, emotionally, financially. Trying to organize around school, around work, around your kids, all of that, so a lot of fatigue.
After having to leave home so many times, Cole said he and his neighbors have the the process down, with systems for packing and finding places to stay.
With this evacuation, Cole said that there has been less rain than expected so far, which gives some feeling of relief.
Cole is also a member of the Santa Barbara Bucket Brigade, a local volunteer group helping Montecito residents dig the mud and debris out of their homes. He said that even if that work is undone by the current rains, his bigger concern is for more serous damages, like loss of life.
Orange County cities threaten lawsuits over planned homeless shelters
What CSU students need to know about new proposals to improve access
The California State University system has been around for almost six decades, but the standards to get into its schools have changed dramatically. Last year, about 32,000 high school seniors were turned away from their first-choice CSU campus because of high demand.
To fix that enrollment problem, the university's trustees unanimously approved two proposals yesterday. Nathan Evans is Chief of Staff for Academic and Student Affairs at CSU. He joined Take Two's A Martinez to talk about what the new proposals mean for current and prospective students.
What the two proposals do
The first policy in those situations ensures that students applying from a local area to that particular campus are given priority in admission to those impacted majors. It isn't an absolute guarantee. The quintessential example is nursing. There are simply more students seeking those disciplines than there are resources to support.
The second, under the new policy, in those situations in which a student has not been admitted to any CSU campus but is eligible, they would have the opportunity to be redirected to another CSU campus that does have capacity. A student might apply to Long Beach and San Diego. If a student is not admitted to either of those campuses, they would be contacted and told about other campuses that do have capacity, and they could be redirected to another campus without any additional fee.
How CSU defines local
The local area, local high schools and community colleges are defined by each CSU campus. Here in the L.A. basin, it's more compact, because there are more students and families living in a local area. But CSU Chico, their local area is about the size of Ohio, so there's variation around campuses and that's defined in working with their local partner school districts and community colleges.
What the new policies mean for prospective CSU students
It's an added opportunity for access. That local priority would provide some advantage in the admissions process. With the second policy, if they've done all the right things, there will be an offer of admission at the end of the process.
3 ways WonderCon sets itself apart from other fan conventions, plus 3 must-sees
Starting Friday, thousands will descend upon Southern California dressed in costumes, ready to wait hours to attend panel discussions and with a keen eye for merchandise exclusives.
It's not San Diego Comic-Con we're talking about. That takes place in San Diego in July. This weekend is WonderCon, the sister convention in Anaheim. If it seems relatively new, that's because it is—at least here in Southern California.
1. A brief history of Wonder
As KPCC's Mike Roe explained, WonderCon first came about over 30 years ago, in the Bay area. In 2002, Comic-Con International, the same owners of San Diego Comic-Con, took it over.
After 24 years of having a home in the Oakland and San Francisco areas, WonderCon moved to the Anaheim convention center due to construction at its San Francisco home, the Moscone Center.
"Now it's become a part of the Southern California fan community," said Roe.
But don't expect it to move to Los Angeles anytime soon.
It actually came to LA for one year a few years ago...they were sort of trying to sell it as a way to win San Diego Comic-Con to L.A. but they moved back to Anaheim after being here for a year and no signs yet that they're coming back.
2. How is it different from Comic-Con?
The main difference? WonderCon is more accessible.
You don't feel like you're about to get crushed by crowds with every single step. Also, when San Diego comes down they take over the whole city. Well, WonderCon is a little more manageable. It's about, I believe, maybe like...a sixth of the size of Comic-Con.
That still amounts to tens of thousands of people but because it doesn't have the same recognition of its big sister convention, it's easier to navigate through.
3. Always innovating
Two words: Digital lottery. Just another way the convention is stepping into the future.
For the first time, they're doing an online lottery. Used to be you had to wait in these giant lines. It was still a lottery but you never knew if you actually were going to get the chance to get up there and meet someone you like...
This approach is done with the hope that convention attendees will then have more time to enjoy the actual show, instead of just standing in a line.
So what are the highlights of this year's convention? There's too much to list here, but here are three picks from KPCC's Mike Roe:
Warner Bros. Pictures: Ready Player One
Warner Brothers makes waves every year at Comic-Con with a panel full of surprises and announcements about their upcoming film projects. WonderCon gets the smaller, junior version, but they still have what looks to be the biggest panel of the convention.
The panel description promises the chance to meet the film's central group of heroes, the "High Five," along with the author of the book the Steven Spielberg film is based on, Ernest Cline.
DC Action Comics: Celebrating 80 Years of Superman
What's a comic convention without comics? Action Comics #1000 is about to come out, featuring the DC Comics debut of longtime Marvel writer Brian Michael Bendis, along with the return of Superman's fabled red tights. To celebrate, DC is holding this panel with a range of writers and artists talkinga bout their favorite Superman moments, what went into this massive anniversary issue and what's coming next for the Man of Steel.
WonderCon's first offsite: AMC's The Terror
One of the things that makes San Diego Comic-Con such an overwhelming experience is that it takes over not just the convention center, but much of the city, with a wide variety of offsite experiences sprinkled throughout San Diego's Gaslamp District.
Now WonderCon's getting in on the fun, with an offsite promoting the new AMC show, "The Terror," based on the true story of a British Royal Navy expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage. Visitors to this offsite are promised to get a look at the ship's tragic trip through far northern waters — and a chance to experience the fear and despair of the ship's crew.
You don't even need a WonderCon badge to go see it — it's open to the public on the Anaheim Convention Center's Grand Plaza, starting at 11:30 a.m. Friday morning.
Mike Roe will be tweeting from WonderCon all weekend, you can find his Twitter
. And you can find more information on WonderCon here.
Documentary features true story of Chicano civil rights leader
Oscar Zeta Acosta was a giant in the Chicano civil rights movement that rocked Los Angeles in the 1960's and 70's.
Many only know of Acosta as the inspiration for the Dr. Gonzo character in Hunter S. Thompson's drug-fueled book, "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas." While Acosta was legendary for his raucous ways, he meant a lot more to Los Angeles than the Doctor Gonzo character portrays.
The documentary "The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo" seeks to tell the real story of the legendary activist and author.
Phillip Rodriguez directed and co-wrote the film. He spoke with Take Two's A Martinez about the mark Acosta left on the world and why Rodriguez was driven to revisit his legacy.
Interview Highlights
Why did you want to tell Oscar Zeta Acosta's story?
Oscar’s story had been left for dead. It had been mischaracterized as the legacy of a buffoon, a sidekick, a Tonto – of an inadequate savage. It was Hunter Thompson’s decision to write Oscar as a drug-addled, 300-pound Samoan in 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,' which is where we know Oscar from. So it seemed to me only fair to correct the record. They were colleagues, they were pals, and in a certain way they were kind of obsessed with one another for a while, and I think they inspired one another. And things at one point went south…
Why cast actors to re-enact interviews instead of using the original source material?
God bless PBS because this wouldn’t have been made anywhere else, but very often those documentaries have a kind of formula, and it's lots of old folks talking about the past. And we tried it. When I saw the footage, I felt kind of dissatisfied. It wasn’t doing Oscar's chaos and madness justice. So I thought, 'Let’s make the story feel more urgent.' I wanted Oscar to matter to young Latinos specifically and to young people in general, so we made a film that we thought would appeal to a younger set of folks.
Why did Acosta run for L.A. County Sheriff in 1970?
This is a time before the federal government has to come in and discipline L.A. law enforcement. This is a time when the vast majority of the Sheriff's Department and the LAPD were very white. They had basically occupied East L.A. and provided those citizens -- the brown one -- a treatment that was uncivil and often criminal. And Oscar was responding to some deaths that had taken place in the L.A. County Sheriff's jail. Oscar believed that they were homicides on the part of the Sheriff's Department, so Oscar's response was marvelous. In order to draw attention to these injustices, Oscar decides to run for the office of Sheriff, with no money, with no resources. With simply his gall and his talent for performance on television and his capacity to get the press which loved him … because he was so funny, self deprecating, bright and peculiar. He was able to get on T.V. quite a bit. His candidacy really drew attention from the radical chic’ers in the hills of Hollywood to East L.A. people.
Why revisit Acosta's story at this time in history?
So often now, when we see a documentary about a Mexican-American, it's always a rural figure, really Rousseauian– a noble savage kind of figure. Oscar was a lawyer, he was educated, he was a novelist, he was urbane, impatient, rude, hungry, and he was entitled. He doesn't fit that paradigm of the Mexican-American hero that society offers up ad nauseum. Oscar is an exuberant dissenter. One of his mottoes was, 'The revolution doesn’t have to be a drag.' I can be serious and have fun at the same time. To me, the kids obviously are being put upon economically and racially. It seems to me that someone like Oscar, who’s so fun and so ridiculous, and effective, and dissenting– he’s a much more appropriate figure from that era for young people today.
"The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo" airs on PBS Friday, March 23, at 9 p.m.