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.

You say you believe in the Democratic process, in the right of an informed electorate selecting the most viable judicial candidates from the marketplace of lawyers who have distinguished themselves in their careers. You say voters are intelligent enough to make good choices, to select the most qualified candidate, unswayed by the politics of the moment or popular sentiment. Then you look at the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, gasp, and decide to rethink the whole thing. Yes, we are a law-and-order state that doesn't cotton to coddling criminals. But our current crop of judges who man (and woman) the state's highest court of criminal jurisdiction have little regard for legal precedent; they seem to be making up the law as they go along. They have little intellectual candlepower since they are notorious for affirming guilty verdicts even in cases where DNA evidence suggests innocence. Some of them even have questionable integrity: Witness new presiding Judge Sharon Keller, who rails against pornography at the same time she is the landlord of a titty bar in Dallas. These guys are the state's court of last resort for our booming death penalty business. Even George W. deserves a better backstop.

As you can tell, we don't have the utmost respect for anchors. They are newsreaders, as the Brits call them. It is a skill, sure, but it ain't journalism. That said, we've always respected Tracy Rowlett. Not just because he has hard-news chops, not because he's overly humble, but also because he's been anchoring and leading TV newsrooms in Dallas since 1975, building up a reservoir of respect that few are accorded. Channel 11 will probably never do as well in the ratings as Channel 8 or Channel 5, and some people continue to suggest this had something to do with Rowlett's worth as lead TV news figure for his station. That's ridiculous. You don't confuse quality with popularity, unless you think that Mike Snyder is the be-all, end-all of Dallas journalism.