I woke with a start. The Tuesday council meeting had been droning along with mesmeric predictability. There was a six-figure transfer from the Storm Water Abatement Fund. Some General Plan updates. A Request for Proposal for an L.A. Triathlon. A list of new “Technical Corrections for the Plumbing Code.” My chin drooped. Unconsciousness beckoned appealingly.Then my ears pricked up. If I didn’t know better, I mused, I’d swear everyone was talking about ostriches.In fact, that’s exactly what they were doing. David and Monica Mohilef, “trustees of the Mohilef Family Trust,” were being brought to book, as it were, for wanting too many ratites (at first, I heard “rate hikes”) in their secluded Chatsworth enclave.Ratites, as I’m sure you know, are “ostriches, emus and rheas”: very large flightless birds with a sternum bone, my dictionary says. Otherwise, they evolved on three different continents, so their taxonomic kinship is more apparent than real.