VIDEO GAMES: Are you ready to get...
VIDEO GAMES: Are you ready to get interactive? Ready or not, GTE California plans to drop $41 million in the next 18 months to wire 83,000 Ventura County households with fiber-optic cable (D1). . . . In addition to better TV reception, an array of “interactive TV programming” is promised by the telephone company. GTE’s Mike Crawford says TV viewers are evolving: Once glued to the tube as “passive watchers,” they’re becoming “interactive media participants.” And, he said, they expect to get “movies, games, home banking and shopping, travel, investment and video phone services.”
SAFE HAVENS: Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks continue to pop up as among the safest cities in the nation. . . . A Money magazine study showed that Simi Valley has the fourth lowest violent crime rate of cities of at least 100,000 people. Thousand Oaks wound up 10th on the list. Researchers compiled the list of the 15 safest and most dangerous cities (B10) by crunching FBI stats on the violent crimes of murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. If you add “nonviolent” burglaries, theft, auto theft and arson, Simi Valley ranks No. 1 and Thousand Oaks No. 3.
HIGH MILEAGE: Deborah Ricketts gives new meaning to cross-country running. The 40-year-old Ventura athlete recently completed the equivalent of a coast-to-coast jaunt: 2,810 miles, to be exact. . . . The “Exercise Across America” challenge set down by the American Running and Fitness Assn. didn’t require Ricketts to hit the highway. Instead, she said it helped motivate her to run an eight-mile loop on the Ojai Valley Trail every morning for about a year.
DROPPING OUT: More than 1,100 Ventura County students never made it to their high school graduation last year. Instead, they joined the millions of school dropouts across the nation (A3). . . . County public schools still have a better dropout rate than the state (B1), but the proportion of dropouts climbed a bit. Even the Oak Park Unified School District, which had a flawless record in 1992, lost two students last year.
