NEIGHBORS : Courtly Contest : Eighteen students from Thousand Oaks High will be taking part in a mock trial competition in Sacramento.

Good luck to the 18 students from Thousand Oaks High School who today begin presenting their case at the California State Mock Trial Competition in Sacramento. The three-day contest pits the team, winner of the Ventura County competition earlier this year, against other county champs from throughout the state.

Students will argue the same hypothetical case that they tackled at the county level: Is a security guard who was wearing a swastika guilty of assault, or was he defending himself when he got into a fight with a black youth leaving a store that was robbed?

“We’ve been preparing for this for the past six weeks,” said trial attorney Trudi Loh, one of the team’s coaches. “They’ve worked on improving their objection skills, familiarizing themselves with various rules of evidence. We’ve also tried to sharpen their cross-examination skills.”

This is Loh’s first year with the team, and she’s been impressed with her team’s abilities. “A number of the students are every bit as good as many attorneys,” she said. “One of the students who does our pretrial motion is most definitely every bit as good as many lawyers I’ve opposed.”

We’ll let you know when the verdict is in.

Speaking of the courtroom: Aside from some police officers and a few legal types, the person most closely associated with the Rodney King case in Simi Valley may be Newbury Park resident Chris Harris.

Harris is the KTTV-Channel 11 news anchor who has headed up the station’s live, all-day coverage of the trial since it began March 5.

Talk about doing some hard time.

Harris’ schedule calls for him to leave his home at 5:45 each morning and head to the Los Angeles television studio, where he begins trial coverage at 9 a.m. Except for a brief lunch break, Harris stays on the air until the day’s court session ends about 5 or 5:30 p.m. But that’s not all. Harris then prepares for the 10 p.m. nightly news show, which he co-anchors. He gets home around midnight.

“I am tired, but at the same time it’s an exhilarating kind of tired,” Harris said. “I’ve covered trials much of my career, but I’ve never done it like this before.”

Harris is excited about the Fox station’s coverage and the reaction it has received. “We’ve gotten a lot of calls and letters from people whose lives suddenly revolve 9 to 5 around this trial,” he said. “They do their housework before 9 a.m.”

Eyed in the waiting room of a Ventura optometrist: A couple of those “Where’s Waldo” books, in which the reader (or looker) searches through complicated, detailed pictures for the tiny, goofy-looking Waldo.

One question: Has anyone ever hunted for Waldo without thinking, afterward, that he or she is in serious need of eye care? An optometrist’s office is a perfect place for these books.

When we checked in with Thousand Oaks photographer Marc Alan Langsam back in October, he was preparing to exhibit his “environmental impressionistic photographs.”

Well, his work is still making an impression.

Langsam will be one of eight photographers exhibiting at the Art Rental Gallery at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art beginning Friday. And once again, his work will focus on what ordinarily might be considered eyesores--such as graffiti, ripped posters and peeling paint--but which take on more attractive forms when he shoots them.

A photo titled “Unreal Real Estate” is among those Langsam will be showing. He described it as a close-up image of a big mural. “But what I captured looks like a big building,” he said.

And there’s also a work he dubbed “Lover’s Quarrel,” a photo of graffiti and a mural. “It looks like a face,” he said, “with somebody splattering something on it.”