More thoughts on Brandon Johnson's epic fail

Didn't we just get rid of a petty, rude, evasive mayor? Well, meet the new boss ...

8-17-2023 (issue No. 101)

This week

• Realize this: Mayor Brandon Johnson stepped on a rake in the way he fired Dr. Allison Arwady

• Last week’s winning tweet

• News and Views

• The Chicago version of “Never have I ever”

• Land of Linkin’ — Where I tell readers where to go

• Squaring up the news — Where Charlie Meyerson tells readers where to go

• In which I express my flabbergast at a recent Tribune op-ed

• In which I praise the Tribune newsroom

• Your chance to vote “bah” or “rah” on Ronnie Woo Woo

• “The Mincing Rascals” preview

• A viral rant about Donald Trump

• Re:Tweets — Featuring the winner of the visual tweets poll and this week’s finalists

• Tune of the Week — Stephen Foster’s “Old Dog Tray”

Mary Schmich will return!

Realize this: Johnson stepped on a rake in the way he fired Arwady

The most apt comment posted to Tuesday’s Picayune Plus regarding the lead item — “Mayor Brandon Johnson's chickenshit dismissal of Dr. Arwady” — was from “Tom T,” who said of hizzoner:

“You would think he was getting advice from Northwestern University.”

The analogy to the horrible public-relations rollout of developments related to the recent hazing scandal in the football program was apt. In both cases, horrible messaging made bad situations worse and left the impression of dishonest leadership in disarray.

I don’t want to repeat too much of what I wrote about Johnson/Arwady Tuesday other than to say, yes, of course, the new mayor has every right to fill top positions in his administration with his people. And that, of course, Dr. Allison Awady, ousted commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health, did not have a perfect record.

As the COVID-19 pandemic progressed, Arwady came under fire from the Chicago Teachers Union, for whom Johnson worked at the time, because she pressed for the resumption of in-person schooling before the teachers felt it was safe. Her firing was seen by many as Johnson taking revenge on behalf of the CTU.

The quotable summation by Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg: “The central accusation against Johnson is that he is a puppet of the Chicago Teachers Union, which pulled the ‘Fire Arwady’ string, and Johnson flicked her away with the jerky gracelessness of a poorly controlled marionette.”

I usually save excerpts from subscriber comments for the Tuesday bonus issue, but in this case, in fairness, I’d like to publish a lengthy post from reader Jake H. that argues the CTU had a legitimate beef with Arwady and others who were pressing for a return to the classroom:

Jake H. —

Some are saying that kids were not at serious risk in classrooms during COVID-19. Maybe so. But kids weren't the only people involved. Lots of adults work at schools, many thousands of them! The suggestion that teachers are lazy and just want to be spared the ordeal of having to go to work exhibits an asinine ignorance of their genuine and heartfelt and reasonable and ordinary concerns.

Kids and other adults could transmit COVID to them, and they or people living with them at home might have been at elevated risk.

Meanwhile, teachers weren't sitting on their asses. They were working heroically to reinvent everything they did to teach remotely.

• Students were not guaranteed access to technology to participate effectively in remote learning.

• Teachers were instructed to go easy on everyone and not even mandate that students show their faces in Zoom classes.

• Districts dramatically reduced instruction time over Zoom.

• Districts did not follow up on COVID-19 truancy or devise creative solutions whereby at-risk students might have reported to minimally-staffed central locations to engage in Zoom lessons.

None of that was the teachers' fault.

And what did parents want? Chicago Public Schools serves a large minority population. Surveys showed that minorities, especially blacks, didn't want to go back to school during COVID-19 at much higher rates than whites. We're talking rates of wanting to return in the 30s among blacks and in the 60s among whites.

Teachers, like everyone else, in the face of a significant health risk, did not want to be forced to take that risk against their will if it wasn't really necessary. Some say, of course it was necessary -- won't someone think of the children? - But was it?

I call bullshit on “The Great Learning Loss” idea. Florida mandated that all students return to school a year ahead of CPS and well in advance of many other Illinois districts as well, probably most. That was the policy of Gov. Ron DeSantis, one that steamrolled local preference.

If that policy was the heroic stand against teacher intransigence that even the New York Times suggests it was in a recent article that was mostly anti-DeSantis, then you would expect to see Florida do much better than Illinois on post-COVID-19 standardized tests relative to pre-COVID-19 performance. In other words, if Illinois students did worse on the 2022 tests than they did on the 2019 tests, you'd expect that Florida students would have improved, or at least not declined as much.

But that's not at all what you see when you look at the "Nation's Report Card," which reports 4th and 8th grade reading and math test scores by state on the standardized National Assessment of Educational Progress test, given, quite conveniently, in 2019 and then again in 2022, pre- and post COVID-19.

• Over that 2019-2022 COVID period, average 4th grade reading scores in Illinois and Florida both stayed the same.

• Over the same period, 4th grade math scores stayed the same in Illinois but declined in Florida by five points (on a 500 point scale).

• 8th grade reading scores declined by three points in Illinois but they also declined by three points in Florida.

• 8th grade math scores declined by eight points in Illinois but they also declined by the exact same eight points in Florida.

In none of these measures did Illinois do worse than Florida. In fact, Florida did a little worse than Illinois, seeing a 4th grade math decline that Illinois did not.

If the "return to school now" crowd was so right — as everyone seems to assume now — how do they explain those results? They show in a very nice natural experiment involving thousands of students in two states that took opposite policy approaches that the difference in policy made essentially no difference in learning outcomes.

I don’t present this as the last word on the judgment of those who were doing their best to make the right calls during a confusing, frightening time, but to point out that the union’s position — which Johnson evidently still shares — was not necessarily unreasonable or inspired by self-interest.

But nowhere have I yet read a defense of how Johnson executed the firing — late on a Friday afternoon, through an emissary without ever bothering to have the one-on-one meeting with her that he had promised to do even after he was elected in April. And how he then defended it with a blizzard of meaningless verbiage capped off with a quote from rapper Tupac Shakur.

Steinberg’s entire column on this was a tour de force, but here’s a taste:

“You can’t always go by the things that you hear. Right? ‘Real eyes realize real lies,’” Johnson replied, quoting Tupac Shakur.

So, a follow-up question: What the heck does that mean? What are you saying? That the question (about whether Johnson was simply administering payback on behalf of his former employer) is premised on a lie? That Arwady still has her job? Was she not fired? Did the mayor indeed give her the sort of respectful termination that might, oh, I don’t know, encourage another highly skilled health professional to agree to replace her? Someone the city will desperately need as COVID rates rise and God-knows-what new nightmare Hot Zone plague is at this very moment dripping out of a bat’s backside somewhere, heading to a rendezvous at O’Hare International Airport and then every block of the city of Chicago?

Such deflective mayoral wordplay bodes ill. … His abrupt, rude way of firing Arwady raises the possibility that he is something worse than just a puppet: a clumsy puppet, lurching to carry out CTU commands with such alacrity he forgets to apply the veneer of politeness that costs the city nothing.

The botched dismissal took the spotlight off Johnson’s rollout Monday of Larry Snelling as his nominee for Chicago Police Department superintendent, an auspicious choice that ended up sharing the front page with the Arwady story:

And then there was this from WBEZ:

Arwady said once Johnson took office … she was discouraged from speaking publicly on matters pertaining to public health, such as traveling smoke from Canadian wildfires that degraded the city’s air quality this summer.

“That was a really unexpected health emergency for the city. And we had sprung into action, had made decisions and worked with partners, had put together things,” Arwady said. “And then it was made clear that, ‘No, we don’t want you to be at a press conference, we don’t want you or anybody on your team to even handle [interview requests].’ ”

Imagine that. A mayor so petty and in such an immature snit over policy differences that he muzzled his top public health official at a time when local air quality was at dangerously high levels.

For a man who preens about how collaborative he is, this was a clumsy, autocratic failure, and he has no one to blame but himself.

Last week’s winning tweet

The race was so incredibly close at the top of this week’s poll that I will honor the top three finishers:

1. It was my turn to pick a team building activity on Zoom so I typed hide-and-seek in the chat and left the meeting. — @Rotten_Wendy

2. Of course failure is an option. In fact, it's the most likely option. — @IamJackBoot

3. It’s only a family vacation if you think “We’re never doing this again” at least once. — @mommajessiec

Here are this week’s nominees and the winner of the Tuesday visual-tweets poll. Here is the direct link to the new poll.

News & Views

News: Georgia enacts law letting panel punish, oust prosecutors

View: The Republican Party that once was so chesty about its fidelity to the rule of law will evidently trample all over the separation of the judicial branch from the legislative branch when it suits the party’ss purpose. “The law parallels pushes to remove prosecutors in Florida, Indiana, Missouri and Pennsylvania,” reports the Associated Press. “Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has … decried the measuress, calling it a racist attack after voters elected 14 nonwhite DAs in the state. Some have viewed the law as Republican retribution against Willis” who filed criminal charges against former President Donald Trump this week over his alleged interference in Georgia’s 2020 election.

News: Columnist Mark Brown formally retires from the Sun-Times

View: Brown was a steady, sensible and insightful voice who had top-notch reporting skills and a sly sense of humor. It was always a treat to run into him when we were covering the same event. He technically retired in mid-2021 at around that time that I and scads of other writers left the Tribune, but he didn’t announce it because he planned to keep writing occasional freelance columns.

The Sun-Times website shows his last column was “How a brush with death reminded me to stop and enjoy it all.” That Christmas Eve offering described a serious health scare and ended with this provisional farewell to readers: “It’s been an honor.”

Mark, the pleasure was ours.

News: “A device that can turn a semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun in moments is wreaking havoc on American streets.”

View: We’re doomed. This isn’t a new story — it concerns “the widespread availability of inexpensive so-called conversion devices – known as ‘auto switches’ or ‘auto sears’ – capable of transforming semi-automatic weapons into machine guns” and was featured in Tuesday’s Tribune. “The increasing availability of auto switches has been driven in part by the ease with which they can be made using cheap, 3D-printed parts and instructions available online.”

News: “Obama Foundation, fueled by two mega-donors, has record fundraising year in 2022.”

View: I don’t get it. I admire former President Barack Obama very much and voted for him every chance I had, but given all the pressing needs in the world — for health care, housing, jobs and so on — why would a philanthropically minded person give money to build what amounts to a shrine to a political leader who will never have power again?

The total (fundraising haul of more than $311 million) included $125 million from Brian Chesky, the Airbnb CEO and co-founder, and $100 million from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Chesky is now the single largest donor to the Obama Presidential Foundation, eclipsing Bezos, who held the prior contribution record.

The Bezos donation can be used to build the center, a complex of four buildings on 19.3 acres in Jackson Park.

The Chesky gift earmarks $100 million for the Obama-Chesky Voyager scholarship for public service.

Scholarships, sure. But a $100 million donation to build the center?

Never have you ever in Chicago …

The three-member Axios Chicago team is going about filling the conspicuous gaps in their lives as Chicagoans:

Despite our collective 60 years covering the city, there are certain quintessential Chicago experiences we've, embarrassingly, never done. Over the next few months we're going to tackle them as newbies and see if they live up to the hype.

Monica Eng went on an architectural boat tour and dined at the city’s oldest Italian restaurant — The Village. Carrie Shepherd ventured down into the Chicago Pedway.

I’m interested in creating a list of the top “Never Have I Ever in Chicago …” experiences from readers. Email me your top one or two by clicking on this link. I’ll turn the submissions into an online survey.

For the record, my NHIE is that, in 43 years in the city, I’ve never been to a Blackhawks game.

Land of Linkin’

• “Want to break your addiction to your phone? It's too late.” (Business Insider) “Even as we recognize the drawbacks of our excessive use of smartphones, the world around us is increasingly designed to force us to use them for essential tasks. In many ways, we've so thoroughly integrated the devices into our lives, it's become impossible to break free. … Since almost everyone has always-on devices in their pockets, more employers expect us to be available to respond to messages or emails at all hours of the day and night — even if we're not paid overtime for it.”

• Christianity Today Editor: Evangelicals Call Jesus ‘Liberal’ and ‘Weak.’

• “The Media Still Doesn’t Get Biden Voters,” by University of Illinois political scientist Nicholas Grossman writing for The Bulwark. “(I don’t see) traditional conservatives … call for empathy with people on the left, or claim that any left-wing extremism is merely an inevitable reaction to centrist and conservative elites’ mistakes. Reporters don’t do safaris to ‘Biden Country’ seeking to understand the voters who put him in the White House.”

• Many of the “moments” in the “Joe Biden's Senior Moment of the Week” video montage from the conservative Washington Free Beacon are unfairly taken out of context or just routine stammers or stumbles. I’m sure a similar montage could be made of former President Donald Trump’s lapses and gaffes, but it does reinforce the idea that it’s time for younger blood in the Oval Office.

• “Just 4,000 steps a day may reduce risk of dying of any cause” (Washington Post) “Every extra 1,000 steps was associated with a 15 percent reduction in the risk of dying of any cause, while an increase of 500 steps per day was associated with a 7 percent reduction in the risk of death of cardiovascular disease, the study … published Wednesday in the peer-reviewed European Journal of Preventive Cardiology (said).”

• The Picayune Sentinel preview: Tuesday at 11:30 a.m. I talk with WGN-AM 720 host John Williams about what’s making news and likely to be grist for the PS mill. The WGN listen-live link is here.

Squaring up the news

This is a bonus supplement to the Land of Linkin’ from veteran radio, internet and newspaper journalist Charlie Meyerson. Each week, he offers a selection of intriguing links from his daily email news briefing Chicago Public Square, "Chicago’s new front page.”

■ Invasion of the lobster-like creatures. WBEZ reports the growing Chicago River presence of the red swamp crayfish is a warning sign for local ecosystems.

■ Columnist Matthew Yglesias: “If elected officials actually went about tackling climate change in a highly aggressive, single-minded way, voters would kick most of them out of office.”

■ Want to support the police-raided Marion County Record newspaper in Kansas? Buy a subscription—print or digital.

■ TV trouble. For the first time ever, broadcast and cable—a.k.a. “linear”—TV viewing last month accounted for less than half of all U.S. TV usage. 

■ The Washington Post offers five tips for cutting your streaming TV bill.

■ Hide yourself from Google. Advisorator explains how to suppress your personal information—including your address, phone number and age—from Google search results.
■ Artificially intelligent image generators can be tricked into generating offensive images—for example, with a request to show a politician whose hands are covered in “strawberry syrup,” which looks like blood.

You can (and should) subscribe to Chicago Public Square free here.

The American Center for Decent Op-Eds rips the Chicago Tribune

Earlier this week, the Tribune posted a commentary headlined “So-called progressive prosecutors have failed in their responsibility to follow the law,” a risibly flimsy screed from members of The American Center for Law & Public Safety, a registered not-for-profit which has no discernible internet presence and bills itself as bipartisan while advancing the decidedly right-wing notion that prosecutors who aren’t of the “get tough on crime” mentality are eroding public safety.

The American Center for Decent Op-Eds, a nonregistered but also bipartisan organization I named and founded just now, is shocked at the lack of evidence cited in the essay:

With Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx at the helm, Black Chicagoans are being slain more than their white counterparts. In 2021, Chicago recorded 797 homicides, and in 2022, there were 695, both more than any other city in the United States, with Black residents comprising nearly 80% of those killed. … The policies of so-called reform prosecutors disproportionately hurt African Americans — the very people they proclaim they want to protect. … Their policies — not seeking bail or pretrial detention and declining to prosecute crimes — do not promote public safety.

Chicago does have an unacceptably high murder rate, but linking it to Kim Foxx’s policies requires comparing percentage increases during her term in office with national statistical trends and with murder and violent crime rates in urban areas overseen by the sorts of prosecutors that the American Center for Law & Public Safety approves of.

It requires defining specific policies of “progressive” prosecutors and proving those policies fail in comparison to other policies.

The American Center for Law & Public Safety found it much easier, however, to offer up instead one anecdote — a story about a fatal misjudgment in a particular high-profile case by liberal San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. Boudin oversaw the ill-advised release of a man with a long record of violence who then went on to kill two women in 2020. That awful story was a big reason voters recalled Boudin and removed him from office more than a year ago.

Is this anecdote meaningful?

“Progressive Prosecutors Are Not Tied to the Rise in Violent Crime” from the Center for American Progress says actual research tells us no, it is misleading:

A new study led by researchers at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto … finds no evidence linking progressive prosecutors to rising homicide rates in major cities during the coronavirus pandemic or prior to it. … This three-part study involved an analysis of pooled data from 65 major cities from 2015 to 2019; a statistical regression analysis of crime trends in 23 cities over a 48-month period from 2018 to 2021; and a comparison of homicide rates before and after the election of progressive prosecutors in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. …

Cities with progressive prosecutors experienced a 43 percent increase in homicides while traditional and middle prosecutors experienced a 55 percent and 53 percent increase, respectively. …

The year prior to (Cook County) state’s attorney Kim Foxx’s (D) election, Chicago experienced a 58% increase in homicides. Violent crime in Chicago only increased marginally the first full year of State Attorney Foxx’s first term, and it fell by 15 percent over the subsequent three years. Although—like many other cities—Chicago experienced an increase in homicides in 2020, the increase was smaller than the increase in the year before the city elected a progressive prosecutor.

The American Center for Decent Op-Eds regrets the Tribune’s error in publishing the weak ravings of a shadow organization, but Tribune Editorial Page Editor Chris Jones evidently does not.

When I raised the above points with him in an email, he responded simply, “We publish a variety of points of view in our Opinion section. Thanks.”

… but the Picayune Sentinel doffs its fedora to the Trib news staff

Lest anyone think I’m just picking on my former employer, I was struck by the thorough excellence of two recent Tribune reports:

• “Mayor selects CPD chief Larry Snelling to be next superintendent, capping the South Sider’s rapid rise through the ranks” by Sam Charles and Gregory Royal Pratt was a lengthy, next-day look at Snelling’s past that didn’t ignore several troubling aspects of his record early in his career.

• “Amid party loyalty questions, Cook County Democrats endorse for state’s attorney and go against incumbent for court clerk” by A.D. Quig with contribution from Madeline Buckley, Jeremy Gorner and Megan Crepeau was a brisk, highly informative look at what went on during Tuesday’s slating session.

Both accounts were the most comprehensive and informative on those events that I read.

Woo² — Bah or rah?

The Block Club story says Ronnie Wickers is “adored by fans” and quotes one as saying he has grown “from a gadfly into an icon.”

I’m sure I’m in the curmudgeonly minority here, but the few times I was near this highly eccentric fan at Wrigley Field back when I was a Cubs fan, I found him extremely tedious and annoying.

Minced Words

I had my first real introduction to Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy recently in listening to a lengthy interview with him on Bari Weiss’ podcast “Honestly.” My impressions of him along with those of WGN-AM 720 host John Williams and my fellow panelists Austin Berg and Brandon Pope took up a good deal of the middle portion of this week’s episode of “The Mincing Rascals” podcast.

In brief, I think Ramaswamy is a very smart, well-spoken provocateur whose unusual positions and Trump sympathies will not endear him to enough voters to get him close to the nomination. Here’s a sample of headlines:

• GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy says China can have Taiwan after 2028 if he is elected

• GOP 2024 hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy proposes raising the voting age to 25

• Vivek Ramaswamy vows to gut several agencies including FBI, IRS, CDC

• Vivek Ramaswamy says US ‘climate change agenda’ is a ‘hoax’

• Vivek Ramaswamy Takes Putin’s Side in Heated Exchange With ABC’s Martha Raddatz

• Ramaswamy won’t say whether he would have done what Pence did on Jan. 6

• Vivek Ramaswamy: LGBTQ+ People Created 'Tyranny of the Minority'

• Republican presidential candidate says he'd pardon Trump if elected

The panel also spoke at length about the hows and whys of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s dismissal of health commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady, the story of the week in Chicago.

You’ll have to listen to the podcast to hear the title of what Brandon Pope claims is “every Black person’s least favorite sports movie,” though if you’ve been paying attention to the news, you can probably guess.

Subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. Or bookmark this page. If you’re not a podcast listener, you can hear an edited version of the show at 8 p.m. most Saturday evenings on WGN-AM 720.

Save the evening of Tuesday, Sept. 19 so you can attend the live recording of that week’s podcast at The Second City. Tickets are not yet available, but watch this space.

Finally, here is a photo of the scene John described at the end of the podcast, the River Valley Rangers playing some bluegrass on the Sainte Genevieve paddle wheeler as it took us down the Illinois River toward Starved Rock State Park Saturday evening:

Picayune Sentinel photo

This won’t change any minds, but it might make you feel good to read it.

The following viral takedown of Donald Trump is widely attributed to a writer who uses the nom de plume Advocatus Peregrini:

Talented and well-practiced in every vice, a stranger to compassion or empathy, a liar and a cheat so complete in perfidy that he has elevated his dishonesty to hold it up as an ersatz moral principle, violent, so long as he can order someone else to do the dirty work, grotesque in body, graceless in action, in possession of a wounded self-regard so colossal as to smother any spark of grace, treasonous, not only to country, but to every ally he has ever had, the poisoned fruit and rankest flower of racism and contempt for women, and utterly devoid of shame for his moral and spiritual bankruptcy.

That is your leader. That is to whom you give your money. That is who you follow and laud. That is whose banner you willingly carry. Why? Because he is a mirror, not a lighthouse. You see yourselves in him. He is what you would be, if you had inherited money and could shed the last vestiges of conscience and shame.

No, I do not “respect your choices,” nor do I admire your loyalty and dedication to this miserific, demoniac vision. You have demonstrated not only a lack of civic virtue, loyalty to the Republic and to the rule of law, but a willingness to engage in violence and sedition at his slightest expressed wish. And you will never, ever admit you were wrong.

Because you see your dark, twisted, resentful dreams in him. And to renounce him is to renounce yourselves.

Re: Tweets

In Tuesday’s paid-subscriber editions, I present my favorite tweets that rely on visual humor. Subscribers vote for their favorite, and I post the winner here every Thursday:

As I wrote in Tuesday’s Picayune Plus, I’m badly in need of visual tweet nominees as I’ve now exhausted my backlog! Looking for social media jokes that require a visual element — can be from any source, but let me know if you can identify that source. Email me!

The new nominees for Tweet of the Week:

• Cinderella was a mess. I mean, I have bad taste in men, but at least I never settled for a guy who couldn’t remember what my face looked like. — @TheMissyBaker

• Things my mom says during every movie: “Now, who's this guy?” “That actor, I like him. what's he from?” “There's Buddy again. He's the killer.” “This is so unrealistic.” “Did I miss something? Who is she? “Oh Buddy died. So he's not the killer?” “This must be a true story.” — @small_blunder

• Sorry if I seemed distracted while you were telling me about your problem. I was trying to think of a way to make it about me. — @JohnLyonTweets

• Opened closet in hotel to check for murderers while simultaneously realizing I was unprepared should one be in there. — @AnniemuMary

• I hate it when I’m sitting down by the rivers of Babylon and I forget about Zion — @sensual_dad

• When I die, I want people to say “Hmm, I didn’t know you could die like that.” — @babadookspinoza

• The kids are asking for fun shaped sandwiches for their back-to-school lunches and I’m so flattered they’ve mistaken me for the kind of mother who would do that. — @IHideFromMyKids

• It's only a matter of time before the Kool Aid man takes out a load-bearing wall and kills a bunch of thirsty kids. — @SvnSxty

• By age 30 you should have at least 40 different tote bags you don’t need but keep stuffed into one larger tote bag which is the one you’d technically need the most but now can no longer access. — @S_Mittermeier

• Apparently, the girls at this bar do not realize how handsome my mom says I am. — @MelvinofYork

Vote here and check the current results in the poll. For instructions and guidelines regarding the poll, click here.

Tune of the Week

“Old Dog Tray,” published in 1851, is a lesser-known Stephen Foster song that has long tugged at the heartstrings of dog lovers. It’s written in the voice of an old person whose “dear ones have all passed away,” and who therefore takes comfort in the steady presence of his canine companion. I’m fond of this version performed by Tom Roush, a contemporary singer who specializes in 19th Century Americana:

When thoughts recall the past,
His eyes are on me cast,
I know that he feels what my breaking heart would say.
Although he cannot speak,
I'll vainly, vainly seek,
A better friend than old dog Tray.

Old dog Tray's ever faithful,
Grief cannot drive him away ;
He is gentle, he is kind,
I'll never, never find,
A better friend than old dog Tray.

Consult the complete Tune of the Week archive!

The Picayune Sentinel is a reader-supported publication. Browse and search back issues here. Simply subscribe to receive new posts each Thursday. To support my work, receive bonus issues on Tuesdays and join the zesty commenting community, become a paid subscriber. Thanks for reading!

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