Generally, we shy away from that which is popular. Popular movies, popular music, popular mayors--we give 'em all hell. But not when it comes to radio morning shows. The No. 1-rated show for years has been Skip Murphy and the Morning Team, and we think there's a damn fine reason for this: They do radio right. They are intensely local, they love their jobs, they are funny and honest, they make mornings seem joyous. What more could you want from your radio dial?

You might as well give up on radio, because we can assure you, radio has given up on you. At least the people who run it have. It's all about making the numbers instead of making the listeners happy. Not so at The Bone, where they give the people what they want. Which, as it turns out, is pretty much the same thing Q102 and The Zoo gave them 15, 20 years ago. Sure, there are some "new" tunes (Nirvana, Soundgarden, U2, Pearl Jam and such), but those are just side dishes. The meat on The Bone comes courtesy of Jimi and Journey, Led Zep and ZZ Top, Van Halen (both Dave and Sammy incarnations)--just about anything you'd find on a bumper sticker on the back of a sweet-ass Camaro. And the strategy has paid off, both for the station and the long-neglected Dallas rock-radio fan.

The credo here is that it is never too soon to encourage a child's artistic interests and abilities. Professionally taught, once-a-week classes are available for ages 2 to 15 in everything from pottery and watercolor to pastels, charcoal and acrylics--all in an atmosphere of fun. There are pizza parties, birthday celebrations and summer camps available. Still, this isn't vacation Bible school stuff. The instructors are serious about their jobs. Twelve sessions (three months) run $225, six months cost $450 and a year's worth of instruction is $835. Says instructor Nora Raggio, "We want the kids to learn and have fun." If classes are full at the Plano studio, which has been operating for seven years, try the newly opened art-a-rama in Frisco, 7158 Main St., 972-377-9900.

She whines. She carps. She's half-wrong. Sometimes she's almost impossible to read. But at least she gives a small hoot about what's going on downtown, and with a little publicity blast this year, she's even being noticed for it. Boyd, whose hit-counter reads more than 52,000 lately, is not the force she aspires to be in Dallas. She's just not electable, and she's too doctrinaire to make enough friends to attain any sort of power, but she is almost a perfect match for the Internet, that great democratizer and spreader of faint voices and long-shot causes.

Every year, we make the three-hour trip to the, ahem, Live Music Capital of the World for SXSW, and what we find is a city that pales in comparison to our own (entertainment-wise, at any rate), a place that's been coasting on its rep since before Willie Nelson got in trouble with the IRS. We know moving the yearly music fest north means someone will lose money for a few years. And you know what? We don't care. It's not our money. We just wanna sleep in our own beds after drinking from noon to 2 a.m. Is that too much to ask?

Whether it's vengeance on his former colleagues at WFAA Channel 8 or just being free of them, Channel 11 News anchor Tracy Rowlett has helped give his fellow teammates an edge the other locals sorely lack. Covering the school district, the cops, the controversy over sexually oriented businesses, the folks at KTVT clearly don't have to worry about all the sacred cows and family-unfriendly troubles that keep News 8 in a constant state of flinch. They've come up with a heads-up, straight-on format that's worth watching.

Without a doubt, the Kimbell Art Museum's show tracking Piet Mondrian's long, slow evolution into a 20th-century icon. A gloriously middlebrow effort, the show--organized by the Musée d'Orsay and on display through December 8--sets out to "analyze...the disparate influences upon [Mondrian]--aesthetic, historical, intellectual and spiritual." In other words, museumgoers are treated to that guiltiest of pleasures, a narrative of historical progression, a tale of artistic development in all its outré, Hegelian glory. By consigning formalist analysis to the trash heap of jargon whence it belongs, the organizers manage to telescope much of the story of modernism into the tale of Mondrian. Best of all, they also produced a readable, 100 percent jargon-free catalog.

We're not as down on the new breed of talk-jocks as one might think. Howard Stern is always worth a listen, but we prefer seeing his freak show on E! rather than listening to it. Russ Martin on KLLI-FM (105.3) is indeed talented, but his supporting cast drives us nuts. And some of the new folks at KLIF-AM (570) at least have a pulse. But in the same way we don't mind reading Maxim but feel better about ourselves after reading The New Yorker, we love turning off the squawkers for a two-hour shot of Glenn Mitchell when possible. Mitchell is not only laid-back and erudite (two must-have qualities on public radio), he also can be whimsical and fun. His guests are usually interesting, and when they're not, Mitchell somehow makes them seem so. His show is a lunchtime treat.

Used to be there was one and only one: the venerable USA Film Festival, co-founded in 1970 by filmmaker L.M. Kit Carson. Now you can't shake a reel of film without hitting someone putting together a lineup of films making the fest-circuit rounds--that is, movies without distribution, and only a few worthy of it (for instance, the brilliant Tribute, a Soderbergh-exec-produced doc that played the USA Film Fest and the Dallas Video Fest this year but can't find a taker because of costly music licensing issues). Forthcoming in the days ahead are the Latino-centric Vistas Film Festival in October and the Deep Ellum Film Festival the next month; and in the mix are fests geared toward fans of gay and lesbian offerings and Asian imports.

The obvious joke is that you feel at home on The Range, but it's true. While other stations dip their toes in roots, rockabilly and Texas music, The Range has taken the full plunge from Day One. They play novelty country, swing, new traditionalists and old sentimentalists. They play Conway and Merle, Max Stallings and Jim Lauderdale and everything in between. Bottom line: They play stuff you can't hear anywhere else.