10. The number of featured musicians from the video kicking off a 23-date North American tour to promote “peace and community and mindful joy” through music.

6. The number of songs Mark Johnson, co-founder of Playing for Change, the grassroots organization behind the song and tour, listed when asked for his top five songs of all time.

On the eve of the tour I asked Johnson to talk about the group he founded in 2001 and how his effort differs from the time at camp when we all had to hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.”

Rivers Cuomo, lead singer for the alt-rock group Weezer, was leafing through the August issue of National Geographic when he found it—the picture he wanted on the cover of the band’s new release, Raditude. The jumping dog was one of the “Your Shot” selections—those are photos submitted by our readers. His name is Sidney and he is a three-year-old mutt whose mom was a Labrador mix.

We spoke with the dog’s owner, 34-year-old Connecticut librarian Jason Neely, about America’s newest canine star. Sadly, Sidney himself was unavailable for comment. “He’s passed out on the floor right now,” Neely said. “We were up in Maine and just picked him up at the boarders. He’s been partying with his doggie friends.”

Here at National Geographic, we always strive to be rational. Yet it never occurred to us to copyright the phrase “Rational Geographic.” And now it’s too late!

Rational Geographic Volume II is the new release from rock musician Michael John Hancock’s group Awesome New Republic. The extended-play album is available free as a download and sold on iTunes and Amazon. We spoke to singer and guitarist Hancock, 27, about the origins of the phrase “Rational Geographic” and about his pop-inflected music, which he describes as sounding as if “the radio is having a panic attack.”

While New Yorkers put on all their green and stake out a prime spot on the parade route that is stumbling distance to an endless supply of Guinness, the Irish band members of Bell X1 will indulge in a diner breakfast, prep for an appearance on David Letterman, then jet off to Boston for a St. Patrick’s Day gig.

Bell X1 is perhaps best known for providing the soundtrack to a scene with two girls kissing to “Eve, the Apple of My Eye” on the teen drama The O.C., “We’ll take our breaks where we can get them,” said lead singer, Paul Noonan, at a recent show. The crowd sang along to their quirky lyrics and beats, which have been compared to Talking Heads and Coldplay.

Growing up in the suburbs of Dublin, Noonan says that on March 17th he would usually pin some clover on his jacket, watch the capital’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, and go home before the streets became “awash in vomit.”

There’s a chance you’ve never heard of the Jonas Brothers, and if you’re younger than 15, there’s a chance you don’t have a Jonas Brothers poster hanging in your bedroom. But the chances of either are slim.

The teen pop trio from New Jersey have released three chart-topping albums in the last three years and inspire the sort of lust, obsession, and mass fainting spells that make comparisons to the Beatles inevitable.

While the dreamy sibs have certainly achieved success overseas, we wondered if the boy band equation (cute young guys + catchy tunes = $) holds true in other regions of the world. The answer? Definitely.

Just as she promised, Marcia Ball cooked up “emergency gumbo and shrimp remoulade”— for those days when you just don’t have time to labor over the stove—at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. She did all the work in 15 minutes, then just had to wait another 15 for the flavors to meld.

Here’s what you need on hand:

1 cup flour
1 cup oil
2 big onions
1 green pepper
some garlic
4 boxes chicken broth
2 rotisserie chickens (already cooked)
2 bay leaves
green onions for garnish
parsley
salt
pepper
cayenne pepper

The flour and oil are for the roux, a thickening agent. It can take a good 30 minutes  to stir that flour and oil in a pan until it reduces to a rich brown hue. And it takes a lot of elbow grease. So you have permission to cheat. Ball reports that her brother was waiting in line at a Lafayette, Louisiana, post office and listening to the other waitees talk about food. And they all used roux from a jar. (Google “bottled roux,” and there it is!) “I guarantee that restaurants do it, too,” said Ball. “And you can’t tell the difference.”

In a large pot, she poured some of that chicken broth, and added the chopped onion and green pepper. She didn’t add tomatoes because she just doesn’t like them in her gumbo. She added the bay leaves and both rotisserie chickens, but no hot sauce because “It’s not my goal to burn people out.” You could add some small slices of okra, which also acts as a thickener.
As the minutes ticked by, Ball added a dash of cayenne pepper, some black pepper and salt. She did have a helper on hand preparing roux from scratch, which she added toward the end.

At one point she plucked out a chicken bone and noted, “People who’ve never eaten gumbo are sometimes shocked by bones in the soup.”

You can add oysters or sausage at the end, if you want. Voila: 30-minute gumbo! All you need to go with it is some long-grain rice. “To make it pretty,” sprinkle some chopped green onions and parsley on the top.

Then the lanky songstress prepared an even speedier shrimp remoulade.

She took a plate of lettuce and added some slices of avocado. “This avocado probably cost $5,” she noted. “It’s the most beautiful avocado I’ve ever seen.”

She piled some steamed shrimp atop the green bed.

She took a jar and filled it with ingredients for the dressing:

1 cup vegetable oil
1/3 to 1/2 cup vinegar
1 jar creole mustard (which is dense and brown but wasn’t around, so she used stone ground instead)
2 tablespoons paprika
some finely chopped onion and garlic
horseradish (optional)
Tabasco sauce (although “you don’t have to”)

Then she screwed the lid on the jar. “I don’t have a food processor,” Ball said. So she shook that jar with some serious hip motion and sang, “Shake it up baby, come on twist and shout.”

Hmm, the dressing looked a little thin. Maybe she should have used less oil.

To compensate, she added more mustard. The dressing looked good. Her advice: “Don’t skimp on the mustard. It’s the predominant flavor.”

Also: “Salt and pepper wouldn’t hurt it.” And just for good measure, she added a heaping teaspoon of horseradish.

The dressing was a beautiful shade of tan. She poured it on the plate of lettuce, avocado, and shrimp. And there you have it:
Shrimp remoulade!

If you want to try Ball’s girlhood dessert, take some buttered white bread and dip it in a saucer full of syrup. “Boy, I feel old,” she said, describing the sweet treat. “It’s like from another world.”

Oh, and no matter what you cook, you might want to follow the advice of a friend of Ball’s mother. If asked for a recipe, she’d always say, “First you wash your hands.”

Ball closed her session with a joke that shows how Cajuns will cook just about anything. Two Cajuns see a UFO land, and some odd-looking creature gets out. One Cajun asks, “Now what’s that?”

The other one says, “I don’t know, but make some rice.”

- Marc Silver

Marcia Ball will be cooking on two fronts this weekend at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C. On Saturday night and Sunday afternoon, the award-winning rhythm-and-blues singer/pianist will represent her native Texas with several musical performances and a couple of cooking demos. Pop Omnivore will be there and promises to post her recipes for “emergency gumbo and shrimp remoulade”—ready in half an hour, Ball says. Here’s what the lanky Texan had to say about music, food, and life after Katrina.

You’re part of the delegation representing the culture of Texas. What is Texas music?

Texas music is as big as Texas itself. All the influences that make up the music of an entire country come to play in Texas. We have Cajun and Czech and Mexican and some of the roots of the blues and soul music and rap and, of course, western swing and cowboy music.

There are Czechs in Texas?

There’s tons of Bohemians and Czechs here in Texas. We have a huge polka crowd. The Germans came to Texas in one of the first migrations, in the 1830s. They also came to Mexico, which is why Mexico has such good beer (and why Mexico has a great beer called Bohemia). They brought the accordion with them when they came. And the accordion came from Mexico up through Texas to New Orleans.

What makes your music Texas?

I represent the Cajun culture that doesn’t stop at the [Louisiana] state line but is very strong all the way into east Texas and all the way to Houston.

You’ve got a lot of New Orleans in your music.

I grew up listening to Fats Domino and Huey “Piano” Smith and all the great stuff that came out from New Orleans, and my grandmother was a ragtime player from Lafayette.

Did you study piano?

I took lessons when I was a kid, but like everybody else I quit when I was about 14. I started chasing boys and playing sports and stuff. Then I got into a rock-and-roll band, and after a while started playing piano.

You’ve often classified as a blues pianist, but your music isn’t at all down and out.

It’s New Orleans–style rhythm and blues; it’s got that energy and jump to it.

Your new album is called Peace, Love & BBQ. How come “barbecue” is up there with “peace” and “love”?

The song is about home, about country, about family—about anything you do in the yard where friends and family gather and eat and play music.

Do you have any secrets to making good barbecue?

Oh yeah—I let my husband do it! That’s my secret. My husband is the true cook and true foodie in this family. You know two-alarm chili? My husband’s father, Wick Fowler, started it.

Like many musicians from the Gulf Coast, you wrote a song, “Ride It Out,” that alludes to Hurricane Katrina on your new CD. But isn’t it time to move on?

Those people are still in distress. It’s not over, and we don’t need to move on; we need to move on it. I’m going to play with Tab Benoit and the group he calls Voices of the Wetlands at the opening of the Democratic Convention to address the need to restore our wetlands, to turn attention to the fact that they’re critical to the security and safety of our coastal country, and to our food and our resources. If you like shrimp, eat ’em now [unless] we do something about the wetlands.

Are you unhappy with the government’s response?

For the last eight years, [we’ve had] a government that doesn’t seem to much care about its people. I don’t know if you want to get me started on that.

-Marc Silver