Like much of the mid-Atlantic region, the Washington area has seen an unusually warm winter. Temperatures haven't dropped below freezing often. A morning rainstorm last week brought a crack of thunder. Snow has been so rare and so light the Capital Weather Gang has measured effects on local people and traffic with a Lego man and Matchbox cars.

I love warm weather and hate cold weather. When friends say to me, "I could never live in Florida because I would miss the cold," "miss the seasons" or "find warm weather all the time to be strange," I wonder. I'm pretty sure I could be happy without seasons or the winter. I'd like weather to get chilly, for the NFL and hot chocolate. Overall, though…

But, that said, a winter without snow in a region that used to receive a good bit of snow is disturbing. However you care to attribute that shift — this blog as you know doesn't do politics — we can agree to wonder where the snow is and whether it'll all arrive in March or never again.

The thing I'm okay with, though, is how the lack of big snow and bitter cold is helping me keeping my no-heat streak alive. My streak is in its third year. I've only had to give up my sun-room bed, close the sliding glass doors and move deeper into the apartment's interior (the couch) for a few nights this winter. There has been no need for NYT-described extremes, and there have been no zombie heat moments. But there's another month or two of winter yet to come, and mistakenly thinking it would be warm outside today, I left all the apartment windows open.

My hot chocolate's at the ready.

Fact: Montell Jordan's This Is How We Do It was one of the best songs of '95. Fact: The new Jackson Hewitt "Steve" commercial is one of the wackiest ads on television right now. Fact: Either you love or you hate it. Fact: The New York Times wrote a truly unwacky story about it. Fact: The YouTube comments on the video capture its true, huge meta-ness. Race, size, money, music, performance, mediums, reactions, and more.

One says how the large man is not him. One creates a character index. One calls for reparations. One tells viewers, "THIS IS ME RIGHT NOW."

Several explain how doing the dance in a real-life Jackson Hewitt office would lead to imprisonment. Several wonder about race. Many dismiss these concerns. One says he always dances along with the commercial on his TV. One says the commercial makes him want to do his taxes at that moment. Several like watching the commercial with the music and then watching it muted. Several make detailed reviews of the different dances. Many have different favorite dances and people, especially the dancer in blue near the end. One compares star "Steve" to people who thumb up or down the video. One demands Montell Jordan come back.

One likes learning the dances. One loves the ad on repeat on his DVR. One wants to go to Jackson Hewitt with a boombox and record it. One says, "Thumbs up if you saw this on tv and went straight to YouTube."

Tickets for many dates on the new Springsteen tour went on sale this week. I was determined to get into at least one show. Of East Coast big-city, reasonable-drive concerts, Washington went on sale near the end of the Ticketmaster release stretch — New Jersey early on Friday, New York a bit later Friday, and Washington and Boston on Saturday.

Friday, I went for the insurance. Tried for the first night in New Jersey, refreshed my browser at just the right moment, for once retyped the Captcha words without typos, and up came two floor seats. Success!

But to buy? Not to buy? Had I just gotten lucky in the maw, or was no one buying Bruce tickets? Would Washington be even easier the next day, making Jersey tickets unnecessary? I hemmed and hawed a few minutes as clocks ticked. Then I went for it. Of course people in Jersey were buying Springsteen (!) tickets. They were probably fighting each other in the streets for them. What was I thinking? I was fortunate.

The two times in my life I had turned my back on fortunate Springsteen seats, I had regretted it. Once was due to youthful hubris, my college friends and I in a moment of insanity throwing back middle-deck seats for the final concert of the Reunion Tour, thinking we could do better.

The second time, also long ago, was due to financial concerns. I ended up paying the same money for far worse seats to the same show. The lesson learned was never, ever throw back great Springsteen seats.

So, I bought the New Jersey tickets. Later Friday, I tried halfheartedly for the New York shows. Got to the browser a minute late, never had a shot. Saturday morning, I tried for floor tickets in Washington. Success again. I wasn't sure what I would do with the New Jersey ones. Could two Springsteen shows within a few days be a bad thing, though? No.

Looking at the news output today, luck was surely on my side. Scalper computers blew up New Jersey sales. The Wall Street Journal even did a story. "As seats went on sale at 10 a.m. Friday for Mr. Springsteen's performances at three venues in New York and New Jersey, traffic on the site shot up to a level 2.5 times higher than any point in the past year, Ticketmaster spokeswoman Jacqueline Peterson said." D.C. sold out within minutes, without trouble. To pay for my fortune this week, fate may never allow me to get Springsteen tickets again. We'll see.

I liked The Artist! A lot! Really! Lori and I saw it at the end of the long weekend we began by seeing a real, old-time silent film. The new-time near-silent film was surely one of the best movies of '12. No question.

But I struggled with the idea of it being Best Picture — winning at the Golden Globes, currently nominated as such for the Oscars. Compared to the other Oscar two nominees I'd seen, the movie was better than Midnight in Paris (terrific and lovable at many points, uneven at others) and incomparable to Tree of Life (with which I was one of the few folks in my theater to walk out happy). Of the nominees I hadn't seen, all of them, just on a review basis, appeared to fall shorter, except for Hugo and The Descendants. I was (and am) still hoping to see them soonish. Anyway, back to the point, I liked The Artist a lot but couldn't crown it.

Why? I couldn't quite explain. I thought, in any movie, Hollywood being in love with Hollywood had its limits. But even if the movie relied on old tricks, I did have to admit the old tricks had new twists or found strong use. The story was well done and the acting quality. I missed people's voices, but that was no reason to dock a movie serious points, was it?

Then I got to this line in a capsule review:

The ideal viewer of Michel Hazanavicius's film would be one who turned up knowing nothing of what was to come; or, at least, who thought that the opening minutes, in silent black-and-white, would soon be set aside, and that a noisy, colorful movie would ensue.

I wondered if I knew too much walking into the movie. I knew no great plot spoilers, and critics' reviews had never knocked a top movie down any pegs for me. But this time around I wondered about expectations, not just for this film but for movies broadly. If a film had no talking, did I miss having a conversation with it? Or, walking in, knowing I would?

I know it's only about 9:30 on the East Coast. But whether you are a Yankees fan or a Yankees hater, whether you think "annunciatory" is a word, whether you've enjoyed Ian Frazier's Radiolab find about Tic Tac Toe or his amazing New Yorker history of trans-Siberian van trips or a million other things, you may love this sentence of his, a recent lede:

"On a dark winter evening when Yankee Stadium is all lit up, it radiates an annunciatory glow, as if an amazing idea had just occurred to it."

I'm glad the new all-news radio station is starting in Washington. I'm happy not because the station is going to be great or WTOP needs the competition — but because the arrival of the station means the last of placeholder broadcasts on 99.1. Following HFS and El Zol to that spot on the dial, the placeholder there has been The History of Rock and Roll.

We ran across the radio documentary on the drive back from Staunton, and the moment nearly drove us to madness. Madness, I tell you! We were scanning stations and stopped in our scanning when we thought we heard oldies. Oldies, I tell you! The format hadn't been on a major D.C. signal in years. The format had jumped to a satellite or "evolved" into overplayed classic rock. To hear a true Motown classic, early rock number or non-Beatles Invasion hit was a rarity. But there one was.

For five seconds.

After five seconds, the song switched to another terrific oldie. Then it jumped five seconds later. More songs followed, more jumping into the next, over and over, dozens of jumps between the best parts of songs where we were ready to sing every word, climb through the radio in a white-rabbit style, even pay money to a free medium to hear the rest.

We finally had to change the station. Ten minutes later, we ran across the station again, this time in an ad break. Maybe on the other side of the break, we told ourselves, the quick-clip feature would be done. But how wrong we were. The seconds of clips began rattling off again, and we had to change stations. We felt broken. The radio was torturing us.

Five Seconds Of Every #1 Pop Single Part 1 by mjs538

Only yesterday, through the station article and a Wikipedia listing, did I learn the mistreatment was purposeful and once even popular. Wiki:

One of the lengthiest documentaries of any medium (48 hours in the 1969 version, 52 hours each for the 1978 and 1981 versions), The History of Rock & Roll is a definitive history of the Rock and Roll genre, stretching from the early 1950s to its day. … Notable features of this documentary include the "chart sweep," featuring a montage of #1 songs and notable hits from a given year or artist, a "time sweep" for each one-hour segment providing a montage of the major hits for each year or individual artist, and closing with a special climactic time sweep featuring a montage of every #1 hit from 1955 to the year of the latest version.

Yes, mind-destroying now when oldies are scarce, the "chart sweep" was the Girl Talk, the mash-up, the year-end DJ Earworm of its day.

It's cool to imagine all the work that went into this initial production. This link, where the above audio comes from, explains the work well. But in 2012, radio stations should know the conflicts of modern ears.

From an alarm clock failure to work issues to extended Metro delays to travel-planning frustrations, it's safe to say today was an all-out loser.

There's a feeling in the pit of my stomach like the rest of the week isn't going to get any better. I don't have that feeling often; and when I do, it's usually right. I've searched for a song tonight to try and fix the day, and that task hasn't gone well either. So, time to shut the thing down.

On to tomorrow.

Lori and her family was nice enough to take me along to see Hairspray at the Signature Theatre last week, and it was my first time seeing the show in any form, stage or screen. The production was good, as quick and upbeat as all the reviews said to expect. Carolyn Cole did a strong Tracy, and the Von Tussles had a quality level of villainous-ness. To get local PBS personality Robert Aubry Davis as Edna was also a kick. Early reviews hit him pretty hard. He was no Harvey Fierstein, but it seemed like he had improved. Scene-stealing, though, were Lauren Williams as best friend Amber and Nova Y. Payton as Motormouth Maybelle. Forget that character's rhymes. Payton's I Know Where I've Been won biggest.

But what really worked for me — and I'm not sure how intentional this effect was — were the questions the show left. Can there be negative space around a bright, happy-ending musical about social progress? I think with John Waters, yes. Even after jumping to Broadway and now into productions around the country, more complicated issues survive in what you take away. Why are the black characters less developed and more sexualized than the white ones? Is the special ed section a send-up of those students or the system that segregates them? While the cast is integrated to near split, why is the audience almost entirely white? What does the casting of Edna mean now? To cast Divine as a sympathetic mom in a family movie in 1988 means something different than putting a large local male celebrity in a huge dress in 2012. How well do the choices of the late-'80s and early '00s work years later?

Lori says she and her mom walked away with similar questions. I like that in a show — takes you effectively in one direction (perhaps in a brightly colored, sing-a-long way), but leaves other directions open.

I'm not as deep into collecting Springsteen bootlegs as I used to be.

I started midway through college and collected a couple hundred until easing off a few years ago. All of this was through downloading (which subverts bootleg profiteers, which the Bruce camp has tacitly backed), not buying (which helps the profiteers, earning the camp's annoyance and occasional legal chase). But the hobby got to a point where it was taking too much of my time. I quit vanity plates for the same reason.

The great sportswriter Giles Smith has a quote, which I posted on this blog once before, amid writer's block, caputured the Freudian nature:

What is it about small boys and completion? [Collecting cricket programs, if I recall Smith's story correctly] I could say I was displaying a precocious interest in the aesthetic of wholeness, but the truth is I was just being reposterously anal. Small boys are pushed that way by the makers of bubblegum cards, by the designers of petrol station promotions, by Stanley Gibbons [apparently it's a British stamp thing] and countless others who encourage us to "collect the set" and are never made to answer for the psychological implications of what they do.

All of this personal background is to explain to why I missed the news in December that Wolfgang's Vault, the great concert-archive site, has acquired the original tapes of one of Springsteen's killer 1978 Passaic shows and plans to restore, digitize and release the video in 2012. I hear the show isn't my favorite all-time bootleg (September 19, night one of the stand, booted as Passaic Night and as Piece de Resistance), but you have to imagine the subsequent night was damn good too.

But wait! You can do more than imagine. A beat-up, not-yet-restored copy of this video is online. It's damn good. Can't wait for Wolfgang.

In Frederick, the Weinberg Center for the Arts has a grand old movie theater with a Wurlitzer organ. Arriving there in 1926, the instrument is the only theater organ in all Maryland still in its original installation.

And it could not be more installed. The organ sits beneath the center of the stage, rising and lowering at will, with pipes running under the stage and behind side walls, all venting sound into the open through grates. For theater work, the organ is significantly more complex than your standard church organ. Weinberg organists mock church players. I'm not kidding. It's great. Along with the usual keys and pipes, there are buttons and back-end mechanisms to make the sounds of dozens of different instruments, like bells, drum hits and even horse-clopping.

Why would an organ need horse-clopping? Silent movies. An organist in old times would accompany the movies all day long. The advent of talkies nearly killed off this machine. But for some reason, the theater kept it. Various restorations and acts of love followed. Read details.

All of this history leads to the present day, where throughout the year the theater screens silent movies and an organist plays nonstop for an hour and a half, or however long is necessary, often writing their own scores in the weeks before a screening, to bring the film to your ears.

Lori and I saw the legendary Douglas Fairbanks swash-buckle his way through 1926's The Black Pirate, one of the first Technicolor pictures. It was the Pirates of the Caribbean of its time. Critics hated it. Audiences loved it. The plot was thin, but stunts and effects were great. In that film-making era, how Fairbanks cut his way through the ship's sail and rode his way down as he sliced without visible wires, I have no idea.

The same goes for a scene of dozens of rescue troops swimming under water at once. Did they use a giant tank? The scene, as old as it is, still throws you off-kilter. I wish there were a YouTube clip of it. Other parts I wish were on YouTube? A converted pirate keeping himself awake to protect the pirate by leaning on multiple knives. A compilation of every instance men in bathing suits tackled each other. The ship explosions.

All of the scenes were innovative and inspirational, in their own ways. How might the storytelling get him down from the topsail? How might you do an underwater scene when you didn't even have sound? How might the pirate keep himself awake? How might he improvise? Even with the constant, amusing bathing-suit tackling, how might you give everyone in a shot something to do, lacking good coordination tools?

Also, it's 1926. You're experimenting with color. What do you do?

The organist's stamina was amazing, never letting up during the film. He also gave a good introductory talk and stuck around for questions after. You couldn't ask for much more for $7 on a Saturday afternoon.

For food after, Bryan Voltaggio's new Volt Lunchbox was nearby. As casual as original Volt was pricey, the spot was open until 6:30. Five-dollar sandwiches (get The Pilgrim, PDF menu), chocolate milk, soups, salads, and cookies were fresh, tasty and capped a Frederick win.

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