NEIGHBORS : Horse Healer : A parapsychologist uses a phone, hands and a crystal that points to problem areas on a diagram.

Is your horse hoarse?

If so, you may want to check out Karen Hamel-Noble’s lecture/demonstration at the Flying “A” Ranch in Santa Paula Friday through Sunday. The Oklahoma-based equine parapsychologist has been known to heal a few ailing horses in her time, mostly by phone.

“I’m working with electromagnetic energy,” Hamel-Noble said. “I take the horse’s name, registration number, birth date, sex and color. I have a quartz crystal and swing it over that information of the animal. I swing the quartz over a diagram of a horse. The pendulum goes around and tells me there’s a problem here, a problem there. . . . I just know how to read my pendulum.”

After locating a horse’s problem, Hamel-Noble puts her hands over the part of the body, in the diagram, that she wants to cure. “I understand what I do, but I’m always in awe of it,” she said. “When you see all of the weaknesses in the horses and you clear them up, you know dang well it works.”

In the eight years that Hamel-Noble has been doing these long-distance cures she has accumulated a couple of thousand clients in 20 states and three provinces in Canada.

The cost of a treatment is $50 plus the phone charge.

Ojai’s Chamber of Commerce has had the same illustration as its logo since 1956, but that will change soon. Tonight, governing board members plan to vote on a new piece of art.

Why the change? “This is the 1990s,” Executive Director Margaret Westrum said. “We’ve remodeled the office. We have a new staff. We wanted a nice new logo to go with it.” Several months ago Chamber of Commerce officials asked the public to submit ideas for the new logo. They received 50 responses. That number has been narrowed down to five.

Many of the logo ideas were submitted by students in the commercial arts class at Oxnard College. “The Chamber of Commerce said they were interested in changing their image,” instructor Sidney Balbes said. “The old logo symbolizes the city itself, but it really is expanding more to Ojai Valley, not just the provincial town. It’s a large area and they want to incorporate that feeling into their logo.”

Checking your local listings . . . If you haven’t yet done so, there are still two days left to catch the television debuts of Emily Hansen of Camarillo and Emily Volpe of Thousand Oaks.

The two 16-year-olds won an MTV contest and so were visited by Pauly Shore, the comic who hosts “Totally Pauly” weekday afternoons from 3 to 4:30. The Emilys, both students at La Reina High School in Thousand Oaks, are being featured on the music channel all week.

“We were supposed to send a letter to him giving 10 reasons why he should come to our house and film,” Hansen said. “You’re supposed to take him around and show him your hometown. He has a real surfer-dude attitude so we used a lot of surfer language to get his attention.”

The premise of Shore’s continuing saga is that he’s moving in with various lucky families across the country for a week at a time. In reality, the week’s worth of shows was filmed in one day and night.

“First he picked us up from school. All the girls went crazy,” Hansen said. “Then we went miniature golfing; we played video games. They filmed him taking a bubble bath.”

So did the Emilys like the real-life Pauly? “He’s like one of our heroes,” said Hansen. “He’s so natural. And he’s cute too.”

What’s a sure-fire way to attract attention?

Fill a children’s wading pool with salad. That’s what the California Vegetarian Assn., headquartered in Thousand Oaks, will be doing Saturday. Members will set up the super salad bowl outside the Premier Health Foods in the new Stagecoach Plaza in Newbury Park and serve dinner-sized platefuls for $1.

“We’re calling attention to the fact that organic farming is on the increase,” President Jeannette Scovill said. “We also want to encourage people to raise organic produce at home.”

Scovill said it will take about three cases of lettuce to fill the pool, not to mention tubs full of shredded vegetables, cucumbers and sprouts.

Those who worry about grazing out of a used kiddy pool can eat without fear.

“We bought this one just for the occasion,” Scovill said. “We wanted a pristine pool.”