From a rapidly darkening Thompkins Square Park, Johnny and Echowood, along with special guest star Baierman bring you part 1 of The 3 Chords & the Truth Mailbag. We discuss the New York City rat population, Serena Williams' blow up, and a host of other questions.

We answer more questions on next week's episode, so stay tuned.

As a Floridian, national news stories from my back yard are usually a source of disappointed sighs or outright face-palms. But this story on CNN today, shot at the gentlemen's club right up the street from where I live, had me wiping away tears of pride.

"Surrogates" ** (out of four): Like the titular avatars in this graphic novel adaptation, "Surrogates" is a rote whodunit masquerading as a techno-thriller.

There are some interesting ideas rattling around inside "Surrogates", Jonathan Mostow's serviceable graphic novel adaptation, and they're all packed into the first five minutes. During an impressively expository title sequence, we are brought up-to-speed on the events of the past fourteen years. It seems the pursuit of brain-controlled artificial limbs has led to the invention of full-sized prosthetic bodies that can leave the house and perform daily tasks while their human owners (or "operators") lay at home on comfortable recliners wearing high-tech goggles. In the fourteen years since the introduction of these "surrogates", human beings have stopped going outside. Crime, racism and disease have all but vanished (for some reason). Only a radical splinter group of humans (called "Dreads") protests the surrogates, but they've been relegated to small, sovereign reservations scattered throughout the world.

Read more on BigPictureBigSound...

If this video is to be believed, and it appears legit, this is one lucky guy.

As he shoots at his target the bullet ricochets and blows his hat off. A few inches lower and he'd resemble Kurt Cobain.

Gun safety.
Some people practice it. Some get nearly killed before they realize they should.

The greatest professional wrestler of all time - damn right - now has a scratch off lottery ticket.

It's the Wooooooo! Scratch-off Game

To honor their native son - the stylin', proflin', Wooo! chanting, 63 year-old "Nature Boy" Ric Flair - North Carolina has released this official scratch off lottery card.

Like the 16 time world champion, there's 16 chances to win. Top prize is enough to buy a few 14k gold championship belts, 100,000.

I just may take a road trip this weekend to visit Evil Rich and pick one of these up.

Proceeds benefit the NC schools. Lets hope they don't teach kids to follow Ric's grammar.

Via News Observer.

Did you see the commercial where John McEnroe repeats his famous catch phrase?

Yeah, I liked that one too.
It's just, I think I've seen it before.

More than once.

You know what, I'm right.

This radio ad was Glenn Beck's first television appearance, in 1986.

The ad summarizes in 30 seconds most of what you need to know about the first 15 years of Beck's radio career.

But if you're interested, there's lots more. Salon has a three-part series on the origins of Glenn Beck, which can also be called his biography. I was fascinated for two reasons: I had never heard of Glenn Beck before he started ranting about how awful the health insurance industry was when he was hospitalized a couple of years ago, and the story hits home as I was a "radio personality" from 1982 to 2006 and can picture the story as if I were there. In fact, in some parts of the story I feel like I was married to Beck! But no, that was another deejay of the same age going through the same things. Even he didn't stoop so low as to talk about a crosstown rival's personal life.

"A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."

The series follows Beck up to his first full-time political talk radio show.